As Russian forces besieged the final bastion of Ukrainian resistance within the devastated metropolis of Mariupol, Ihor Titovskiy ready his household for the worst, giving them directions for his funeral in an emotional cellphone name in Might 2022.
“I mentioned there was no must panic: Simply obtain my physique and bury it,” Titovskiy, a senior lieutenant on the time and now a captain, informed RFE/RL. “It was painful for my mother to listen to, however there was no getting round it.”
“Morally, virtually all of the remaining personnel…understood that we would not survive,” he mentioned in an interview. “It was solely a query of time, when it will occur.”
The funeral can wait, although. Not lengthy after that decision, Titovskiy and the opposite Ukrainians holed up on the Azovstal steelworks — a lot of them fellow members of the Azov Brigade — surrendered on orders from Kyiv and have been taken captive, cementing Russia’s takeover of a once-thriving metropolis laid to waste three months into Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
For Titovskiy, after 86 days at Azovstal, the ordeal had simply begun. He and different prisoners endured extreme beatings, electrical shocks, starvation, and different abuse, he mentioned, earlier than he was freed in a prisoner swap 846 days later. When he was bused to Belarus and introduced throughout the border to Ukraine in September 2024, he weighed simply 50 kilograms.
Fortunate To Survive
From Mariupol, Titovskiy and lots of different members of the Azov Brigade have been taken to a jail in Olenivka in part of the Donetsk area lengthy occupied by Russia. There, he mentioned, he was fortunate to outlive one of many deadliest single incidents within the battle: highly effective blasts that killed no less than 50 prisoners on the evening of July 28-29, 2022.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has known as the blasts “a deliberate Russian battle crime.” The United Nations disbanded a fact-finding mission the next January after Russia impeded efforts to research, disturbing bodily proof and refusing to provide UN displays entry to the location.
Titovskiy, 43, mentioned he survived by a quirk of destiny. Assigned to a watch shift, he was stepping exterior when an explosion ripped by way of his barracks, blowing him out by way of the doorway and injuring an arm and a leg. He went again into the burning constructing a number of instances however noticed no signal of the lads whose bunks had been close to his.
“My bunk was the second from the highest; my pal slept under me. It was as if that they had by no means existed,” he mentioned. “I went in three or 4 instances, pulled out extra guys. However I could not discover my bunk, my brothers, or my issues. Nothing in any respect. The place there had been eight bunks there was simply an empty area.”
Russia claimed the blasts have been attributable to HIMARS rockets launched by Ukrainian forces, however the UN Human Rights Workplace concluded that was false, saying, “The sample of structural harm appeared in step with a projected ordnance having traveled on an east-to-west trajectory” — in different phrases, from deeper in Russian-held territory.
“The shortage of accountability for the deaths and accidents on the penal colony in Olenivka matches into the broader context of widespread and routine torture of Ukrainian POWs,” the UN mentioned in 2024, additionally describing what it mentioned have been “deplorable situations of detention” for a lot of POWs.
“Russian authorities have subjected Ukrainian POWs to systematic and widespread torture, together with sexual violence, and poor situations,” the identical UN Human Rights Workplace mentioned in a report printed in February, three years into the full-scale invasion. “Torture has been pervasive throughout interrogation and all through all phases of captivity.”
For Titovskiy, the worst of the abuse and mistreatment that many would describe as torture got here later. From Olenivka, he and different survivors of the blasts have been despatched to a jail in Taganrog, a Russian metropolis not removed from the border, the place they have been greeted instantly with brutal violence, he mentioned.
“They beat us, in case you can name it that,” he mentioned, suggesting a degree of abuse that the phrase doesn’t adequately describe. “There have been guys who have been 20 years previous, match and powerful — however even they misplaced consciousness, they have been crushed so badly.”
The Russians have been notably violent “in the event that they noticed tattoos, and Azov members have very a lot of these,” Titovskiy mentioned. “Any crossed strains have been thought of a swastika. You would clarify to them 300 instances that it is an abstraction, however all the identical, to them we’re Nazis.”
The Azov Brigade
Now a part of the Ukrainian Nationwide Guard, the Azov Brigade was fashioned as volunteer battalion out of a right-wing militia in Might 2014, shortly after Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine and fomented battle within the jap area often called the Donbas.
Russian officers have seized on the origins of the Azov Brigade and its zigzag image to help the false assertion that Ukraine is managed or dominated by neo-Nazis — one of many principal narratives the Kremlin makes use of to aim to justify the battle.
Titovskiy, who’s from Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya area, joined the army in 2014, wanting to defend the nation because the Russian onslaught started. He began serving with the Azov Brigade in November 2021.
Over the three months he spent on the jail in Taganrog, Titovskiy mentioned, he was subjected to a three-day interrogation “the place my legs have been crushed.”
“Actually, my complete left facet was crushed so badly that it turned black. One leg even began to fester. I could not stand on it as a result of the festering reached the ankle joint,” he mentioned. He was then despatched to Crimea “for amputation,” he mentioned, however his leg was not amputated. As a substitute, he was handled with antibiotics that healed the wound.
After that, Titovskiy was despatched to a jail deeper in Russia, within the metropolis of Kamyshin, the place he mentioned Federal Safety Service (FSB) officers subjected him to electrical shocks.
“It was a brand new hell, as a result of they beloved shockers very a lot there,” he informed RFE/RL. “It was the primary time I might encountered this.”
“The FSB [guards] interrogated me with an electrical present for 2 days” upon arrival, he mentioned. “They put a sack over my head, tied my fingers behind my again, and threw me to the bottom…. Two of them sat on me and so they turned on the present.”
The jailers at Kamyshin used electrical shock and different strategies, together with setting canines on the prisoners in makes an attempt to get them to admit to killing civilians in Mariupol, Titovskiy mentioned.
“They beat [us] with their fingers, with their ft, with truncheons, and with plastic water pipes,” he mentioned. “When my weight dropped to 50 kilograms, they mentioned, ‘Tense your abdomen muscle groups, we will punch you now.’ After which they requested, ‘How was that punch, was it good?””
Titovskiy’s regular weight is 70 kilograms. On the jail in Kamyshin, prisoners got “150 grams of kasha thrice a day,” he mentioned. “For a grown man, that may be very little.”
Furthermore, they have been pressured to eat rapidly, and if somebody did not end in time, they’d all be punished with smaller parts on the subsequent meal, Titovskiy mentioned.
Prisoners weren’t given socks or underwear, and Titovskiy used the identical toothbrush for all of his practically two years on the jail: “They gave us one bar of cleaning soap for 16 individuals. There was virtually no rest room paper, toothbrushes, or toothpaste.”
These dire situations modified solely when an official fee got here to the jail or, on one event, when there was a go to from representatives of the Pink Cross — and even then, the prisoners got gadgets for present however in some instances forbidden to make use of them, he mentioned.
In September 2024, Titovskiy was moved once more, to Belgorod, the place he and his fellow prisoners have been shocked by the well mannered habits of the guards and “completely white sheets and towels” of their cells.
“Within the morning they introduced us out and a [Russian] particular forces officer says, ‘Guys, you are going house. Say hello to your households,'” he mentioned.
However Titovskiy had heard this earlier than, solely to be despatched again to jail, so he did not consider it at first. His hopes have been excessive although after they boarded a civilian bus, which took them to the Ukrainian border.
It was Friday, September 13, and “after we bought off the bus, we noticed an indication and began to giggle: The clock mentioned the time was 13:13,” Titovskiy recalled.
“Later I mentioned that if anybody tells me 13 is an unfortunate quantity or Friday the thirteenth is a cursed date, I can confidently spit of their eye,” he informed RFE/RL. “It was the happiest date and the happiest day of my life. To return to your homeland — I’ve no phrases. It is one thing else.”
