HUNGER IS A RUSSIAN WEAPON

FREED UKRAINIAN POWS TALK OF THEIR TREATMENT IN CAPTIVITY WHILE FAMILIES OF PRISONERS FIGHT FOR MORE RELEASES

- Michael Wasiura

UNTOLD THOUSANDS OF UKRAINIAN prisoners of war remain in Russian captivity. For the most part, international organizations have not been granted access to the facilities where these soldiers are being held. As a result, concrete information about the number, treatment and condition of Ukrainian POWS is available only through conversations with the few hundred soldiers who have been released as part of prisoner exchanges.

Newsweek spoke with two family members of Ukrainian prisoners of war, along with one soldier who was released in November after being captured in May at AzovStal, the now-famous steel plant in Mariupol, where a small force of Ukrainian soldiers held off elite Russian forces for 82 days before their final capture on May 16. Together, they tell a story of systematic brutality in the treatment of prisoners of war, one that the international community thus far appears powerless to stop.

Many experts credit the defense of the AzovStal steel plant for saving Kyiv, the capital city, from Russian occupation, by keeping the Russian forces engaged in the south of the country. But some 260-odd Ukrainian soldiers, as estimated by The Guardian, who fought so long and hard under constant bombardment, paid a terrible price during the nearly three months of the battle and even more so after their capture.

"I lost 30 kilograms in Russian captivity," Dmytro, the former POW, tells Newsweek.

"Officially, we had three meals a day, but they didn't give us time to eat it," he says. "They'd bring 200 guys into the canteen at a time, and you had two minutes to eat a bowl of boiling water with a potato and a piece of cabbage in it. You could either burn your mouth trying to eat it all, or you could blow on it until it was cool enough to put in your mouth, but then you couldn't finish your portion."