Survived the torture and is now sitting in the trenches: Stanislav Asseyev
Bild: Oleksandr Magula
Stanislav Asseyev secretly reported from the Russian-occupied “People’s Republics” and ended up in a torture prison. Back in freedom, he put his tormentor behind bars. Now he is fighting for Ukraine.
STanislav Asseyev is back in Donbass. He is sitting in a restaurant in Pokrovsk with a freshly squeezed fruit juice. His army jacket still looks brand new. The uniforms of the soldiers at the neighboring tables, on the other hand, are covered with a layer of dirt and the colors have faded. There are almost no civilians in the restaurant. From the restaurant it is only forty kilometers to the last Ukrainian position. Twenty kilometers further, in the part of eastern Ukraine that has been occupied by Russia for ten years, is the “Isolazija” torture prison. There Asseyev was tortured, humiliated and beaten for 875 days. He experienced firsthand what Russian occupation means.
Until his abduction, he had secretly reported for years as a journalist from the “people’s republics” controlled by Russia. Behind the line of contact where the Ukrainian army and so-called separatists faced each other, Russia’s secret services had established a violent regime. Despite his pro-Ukrainian views, Asseyev stayed in his native Donetsk and kept his views to himself. He wrote texts under a pseudonym about a place that within a few months had become a nostalgic Soviet pseudo-state. In May 2017 he was exposed and kidnapped. Only after years of torture was he released through a prisoner exchange in December 2019.
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