Serhiy Hrytsiv, call name Kurt, is from the First Separate Battalion of Ukraine’s 36th Marine Brigade who, together with members of the Azov Regiment, were among the main Ukrainian forces defending Mariupol in 2022. Hrytsiv was in Russian captivity for two and a half years, being released in a prisoner exchange in September 2024.
He was held prisoner at the notorious Olenivska prisoner camp in occupied Donetsk oblast when he and other prisoners were, over the course of a month, taken at around 4 a.m. every morning to Mariupol which the Russians had relentlessly bombed and shelled from the beginning of their full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Hrytsiv explains that, working in brigades of five people, the POWs pulled out bodies from the ruins of buildings, from courtyards and from mass graves. The dead included children and elderly people. Many had been killed in shelling or from bombs, however others had died of starvation, from the cold or because of the lack of any medical care during Russia’s siege of Mariupol. There were a lot of bodies that had been ripped apart in the shelling. Although they tried to get them out with their hands, technology was required which the invaders didn’t want to provide. In one case, he recalls, it was known that an entire family had been killed. In the rubble, however, they were able to pull out only the body of one woman, with the other bodies left to lie under concrete tiles. A week later, demolition equipment was brought in regardless. As Slidstvo points out, Russia is building new apartments where the bombs fell, although it became clear almost immediately that these new constructions are not for Mariupol residents.
Russia’s use of Ukrainian POWs to exhume bodies was evidently not about ensuring that the victims were all identified and that their remains were properly buried. The POWs were also forced to exhume bodies at the Stary Krym Cemetery, although these were the graves of civilians who had received a burial. Hrytsiv explains that they saw relatives of the people buried who were opposed to the exhumation, however the ‘investigators’ claimed that these were burials under the Ukrainian authorities and that they needed to check that civilians had not been killed. The invaders simply attached numbers to these bodies while often throwing documents back into the dug out trench.
The Mariupol authorities reported back in late May 2022 that the Russians were dumping bodies on the grounds of the Metro supermarket. Slidstvo writes that bodies, given numbers, were taken to this improvised ‘morgue’. Although Alexander Bastrykin, head of Russia’s Investigative Committee, later ordered that DNA samples be taken of people searching for relatives believed to have been killed, those taking the DNA openly admit that they are simply obeying orders. Nothing will be done to compare this DNA with that of bodies found, and indeed people desperately trying to find what happened to their relatives have received official letters effectively admitting that bodies “have gone astray” and that the places of burial have not been recorded. The relatives of those missing continue to receive refusals from the occupiers to initiate criminal investigations or are simply informed that there is no information about their relatives in the existing morgue database.
Slidstvo.info notes that in these documents, the Russians invariably claim that any civilian deaths were caused by Ukraine’s Armed Forces. Russia began pushing such lies, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, back in 2022. In late March 2022, for example, Russian propaganda media posted a video in which a young woman claimed to be from Mariupol repeated Russia’s most egregious lies about the Azov Regiment defending Mariupol. The woman who appeared to be extremely nervous, even tried to claim that Ukrainian soldiers had somehow managed to bomb the Mariupol Maternity Hospital on 9 March 2022. Mediazona swiftly discovered that three ‘interviews’ with this young woman had all been produced by Russia’s Security Service, or FSB, with state media sent the videos and instructed not to divulge their source.
Hrytsiv was clearly not involved in searching for bodies after Russia’s bombing of the Mariupol Drama Theatre on 16 March 2022. The death toll there alone may have reached 600, with most of the victims women and children, as well as elderly, civilians, who believed that the building’s basement would provide shelter from Russian bombs. Two massive bombs were dropped on the Theatre that day despite huge signs, in Russian, around the building with the one word CHILDREN. It is possible that Russia did not want any Ukrainian POWs to see the number of victims, and certainly the area was one of the first to undergo mass demolition, probably to hide evidence of a horrific crime. While brutal indifference to human life and corruption doubtless play a role in the fact that relatives are still unable to find their loved ones, Russia does have every reason to try to conceal the real number of dead.
Serhiy Hrytsiv was one of the countless victims of yet another method used to try to switch the blame for Russia’s crimes against civilians. By 2023, Russia had begun staging ‘trials’ of Ukrainian prisoners of war, especially those seized while defending Mariupol, with most of the first taking place in illegitimate occupation ‘courts’ in occupied Donetsk and Luhansk oblast. The charges in the first of these series of ‘trials’ tended to be of killing and / or ill-treatment of civilians, under articles of Russia’s criminal code. The only ‘evidence’ was invariably provided by men making videoed ‘confessions’ which they were very clearly giving under duress. Since then, Russia has begun using other charges, including accusations of ‘terrorism’ based solely on flawed and politically motivated ‘court rulings’ declaring regiments or battalions within Ukraine’s Armed Forces ‘terrorist organizations’. As mentioned, there have been multiple cases where the same prisoners of war have been subjected to even three such fake ‘trials’ and received three sentences of up to life imprisonment.
Hrytsiv has confirmed how his ‘confession’ used to sentence him to 27 (or 25) years’ maximum-security imprisonment was obtained. During the years of his captivity, he was repeatedly tortured, with the Russians using electric currents attached to his genitals; suspending him upside down; placing a plastic bag with chlorine over his head; pulling out fingernails, as well as savage beatings, leading to broken ribs, etc.
He and the other POWs were, for example, subjected to such torture, he says, to force them to sign so-called ‘confessions’ to kill civilians in Mariupol. If you refused, they’d throw you into a punishment cell. “Sooner or later, after three months, when your health is close to collapsing, you sign it.”
The cynical absurdity of these supposed ‘trials’ was that the Investigative Committee would first use one prisoner of war as supposed ‘witness’, and then as ‘defendant’.
It is worth noting that all international observers have condemned Russia’s use of fake trials and its systematic torture of prisoners of war and civilians. Serhiy Hrytsiv was one of the lucky ones to survive such systematic torture until Ukraine could secure his release. Others have been tortured to death and huge numbers remain imprisoned.
See:
UN report demolishes Russia’s attempts to blame Ukrainian POWs for its atrocities in Mariupol
Ukrainian prisoners of war tortured to death in Russian captivity
While others are celebrating, Ukrainian POWs are being tortured in Russian prisons
Russia’s torture of Ukrainian civilians and POWs is a crime against humanity – UN investigators
