Anton Krutenko was on his third life when the russian soldiers you captured. It was last March 26 in the northeast of Ukrainejust one month after the start of the war. His unit was stationed in a village along the borders of Kharkiv, Lugansk Y Donetsk when she was surprised by the intense fire of the russian artillery. “We ran out of weapons to fight and the commander ordered a withdrawal when he saw that the Russians were coming for us,” he now recalls next to a military hospital in Odessa. During the flight, they tried to hide in a forest. Shells fell like hailstones, and the taste of metal stuck in his mouth, shortly before two bullets will pass through his body. It was then that he realized that the leaf litter on the horizon was actually nothing more than the camouflage of six russian military.
Krutenko reached for the machine gun to defend himself, but his hand would not move. He was bleeding profusely from his stomach and one of his forearms, he recounts now before showing the scars that tattoo his body. He was still conscious but unable to get up when the Russians approached him, pointing their rifles at him.
— Do you want me to let’s finish off with a shot?, They Asked.
— Nope, I want to live He answered writhing on the ground.
Three of his comrades were dead. another was auctioned on site after falling badly wounded. A fifth would end up like him rolling down the russian hospitalsnot knowing if he would return home alive or end up buried under the non-existent statistics of the military casualties of this war, which is approaching its eighth month.
For Krutenko the war had begun the very day he enlisted in the Army, a April 26, 2021just one year before he was captured, the date of the infamous anniversary of the chernobyl disaster. Until then he earned his living as a local policeman in his donbas But the hunger to prosper by joining the national police force left him no choice but to get a college degree he couldn’t afford or serve three years in the Army.
Cluster bombs and phosphorus
Already in uniform, frozen conflict of the Donbas soon mutated into a much more devastating beast when Putin gave the order invade Ukraine. Krutenko, now 34 years old, with a shaggy beard and blue eyes that occasionally go out of focus like those of a frightened child, was sent to defend the Kharkov border with Russia as part of a detachment assault infantry. A day to day dog in those early stages of the war, when Russia advanced without hesitation, before stalling in kyiv and long before Ukraine began to recover ground with its counteroffensive. “The fight was very hard. They bombarded with tanksaviation, artillery, cluster bombs Y match, which burns everything wherever it falls. We spent our days running through the woods,” says Krutenko. “Things only started to change when the foreign military aid and we began to destroy their weapons depots“.
In between, he nearly bit the dust twice. the first remained half buried in a trenchwith bruises and lead in the saliva, after a aviation bomb fell only a few meters from his position. The second one almost didn’t tell it because of an oversight. His people were fleeing on foot in disarray attacked by “dozens of Russian tanks”, when he realized that he had forgotten the weapon in his vehicle and ran to pick it up. He didn’t give her time. Just before arriving, a cannon shot blew up the vehicle and dragged it several meters. “It was March 7, the date of my second birth“, he says now taking a deep breath before answering.
There is little epic in his words. War, she says, is like a night of tortured dreams. “Every day I called my mother to say goodbye. There is a lot of fear on the front, only idiots are not afraid, although the adrenalin and the desire to avenge your comrades They help you keep fighting.”
And then they captured him. Put in a car and later in a tank, where he passed out from the blood he was losing, he was transferred to a hospital in Svatove (Lugansk), in the areas controlled by the Russians and their separatist allies. Along the way they stole his boots and confiscated his documentation.
Russian hospitals
Luhansk was subjected to first operationbefore being transferred to Voronezh on May 1, a city in southwestern Russia, about 330 kilometers from Kharkov. There everything became more distressing. “The nurses were asking the military police why they had brought us. They didn’t want to treat us and they asked them to let us die. They suggested killing me with a lethal injection and saying that I had died of coronavirus“, he states in a story that could not be verified by this newspaper.
He ended up in a room with four others prisoners of war Ukrainians, all of them tied to beds with handcuffs. One day one of the military police guards put on tactical gloves and beat up a soldier from Kyiv tied to bed; then he kicked another of Mikolaiv who did not speak Russian and had a broken pelvis, says Krutenko. The Geneva Convention is long, but in essence it maintains that “prisoners of war must be treated humanely under all circumstances.”
tortured prisoners
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His next stop was Kursk, also in Russia, where the attitude towards prisoners “improved”. There they were forced to sing the russian anthem and study books about annexed Crimea they had to recite to the military police. And again they were interrogated relentlessly. “They wanted to know the location of our unitsthe type of armament we use and the location of our weapons depots“, he remembers now. And although in the Kursk hospital the attitude of the staff was more friendly, when the patients improved they were taken to a isolation cell in a nearby prison. “My wounds saved me, but others were tortured. I know because one of the transferees had to come back because they had broken his leg and arm during interrogations.”
And so on until the beginning of July, when Krutenko found out that he had been included in a list of prisoner exchange. On June 12 he was transferred from Kurk to Simferopol (Crimea) and finally released in Kherson on the 28th of the same month, in an agreement supervised by the International Red Cross to exchange 17 Ukrainian prisoners of war for 17 Russians. “The most difficult thing was living permanently without knowing what was happening in Ukraine. They gave us false information. They said that Zelensky and Biden were preparing a new Holodomor – the particular Ukrainian holocaust perpetrated by Stalin – and that Russian troops had occupied almost the entire country” . Nothing more to be released Anton Krutenko he called his brother to simply tell him that he was alive.