One of five Britons captured in Ukraine and returned to the UK after a prisoner swap between Moscow and Kyiv told in an interview with British tabloid The Sun that he was beaten and forced to sing the Russian anthem in detention.
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Aged 28, Aiden Aslin had been taken prisoner in Ukraine, where he was fighting for Kyiv, and was sentenced to death for mercenary.
After his surrender in the siege of Mariupol in April, “the soldier asked in Russian ‘where are you from?’ I told him I was from Britain and he punched me in the face,” he told The Sun.
According to his account, he was then separated from the other prisoners and interrogated in the back of an armored vehicle.
“The officer was smoking a cigarette and knelt down in front of me asking ‘do you know who I am?’ I said no and he replied in Russian “I am your death”
“He said ‘see what I did to you?’ He showed my back. He showed me his knife and I realized he had hit me with it.
The officer then asked him if he wanted ‘a quick death or a beautiful death’, continued the Briton, whose partner is Ukrainian, to which he replied that he wanted a quick death.
“He smiled and said ‘No, you’re going to have a wonderful death,'” Aiden Aslin told The Sun.
He said he spent the next five months in a 1.20m by 1.80m cell infested with cockroaches and lice, deprived of daylight except when he was taken out to shoot videos. of propaganda or to be able to communicate with the British Foreign Office.
According to the Sun, the prisoner heard the Russian anthem played on a loop and was ordered to stand up and sing or be beaten, and also to shout “glory to Russia”.
“After being forced to sing the Russian anthem every morning for the past six months, I think it’s time to learn something a little better and learn the Ukrainian anthem,” tweeted Sunday Aiden Aslin.
In the Sun, he also thanked “from the bottom of his heart” the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich – under sanctions from the United Kingdom and the European Union – for his role in the release of the five Britons, who been able to return to their country after an exchange of prisoners favored by Saudi mediation.