Ukrainian soldier Glib Strizko was almost killed in a fierce battle in Mariupol.
Zaporizhzhya, Ukraine:
Ukrainian soldier Gleb Strizko’s mother knew he would fall into Russian hands, but it wasn’t until her 25-year-old son, seriously wounded, made a secret phone call to find out where he was.
“One of his guards took pity on him,” she told AFP.
That little pity, as well as the details of her experience—which included a tormenting knife and a painfully long kilometer—offer a window into the dramatic but often ambiguous reality of the exchange of prisoners of war.
Almost killed in intense fighting in the major port city of Mariupol, Strizko was captured in April and eventually taken to Russia and suddenly put on a plane and exchanged for Russian prisoners with others. was sent to the house.
“While we were waiting for us on the bus, the driver said, ‘Guys, you can breathe. Now you’re at home,'” Strizko said from his hospital bed in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhya.
“Then I started crying very loudly.”
It took only a few weeks to reach that point, a remarkably short timeline among prisoners of war whose fates have always been an emotional, high-stakes and sometimes part of a political process that can go on long after the shootings have stopped. Huh.
In Ukraine’s case, more than 350 of its soldiers have so far been freed in swaps, which take place on a one-to-one basis among people of similar rank, Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk told AFP.
Strizco’s Twisting Route Home debuted on social media. A comrade saw him on the Telegram channel, where pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine post pictures of captured enemy soldiers.
Comrade called Strizko’s mother, who was horrified to hear the news, but somehow hoped that now she knew that her son was alive.
“This man had our phone number. Gleb gave it to him, as if he was expecting it to happen,” his mother Lesia Kostenko, 51, told AFP. “That’s when we started looking.”
His son was stationed in the Ilyich steelworks during the Battle of Mariupol. That conflict attracted global attention because of civilians trapped at another steel plant, Azovstal.
Ukrainian soldier Glib Stryzhko and his mother Lesia Kostenko in Zaporizhzhia.
Russian denial
Strezko was hit by a tank shell and buried under rubble on 10 April, before his unit took him to a hospital, where he said he had been taken prisoner.
Now recovering from heavy injuries to his pelvis, jaw and one eye, Strizko describes how his captors previously locked him and other prisoners in Novoazovsk, near the Russian border.
“We were lying there in the hospital and we were not getting any serious treatment,” he said.
He stayed there for about a week before being taken to a hospital in Donetsk where, unbelievably, he gained access to a phone and called home.
“During the first call he told us where he was,” said his mother.
Word of the call spread to the other families of the POWs, and they began to ask him if Strezko knew anything about his captive loved ones. He did not.
The family also lobbied the government to help bring back Strizko, including the deputy prime minister.
Vereshchuk said, “His relatives approached me and asked for my help as a minister – his mother, his brother, his friends. They were all looking for him.”
The minister said he pressured the Russians to exchange Strizko, but he refused to admit that he was in their custody until he confronted him with knowledge at Donetsk Hospital 15.
“After that they were forced to hand him over,” said Vereshchuk.
After about a week in Donetsk, Strizko said that the Russians were taking him again. This time it was in jail, he was told.
There was more painful movement and jostling. He was carried in a blanket, then laid on the floor of a bus, but in the end it felt like he was too seriously injured to be out of the hospital.
He will be transferred again.
“I stayed on the bus for a while. Then they put me in an ambulance and the next stop was the Russian border,” Strizko said. They were told they were on their way to Taganrog, about an hour’s drive from Ukraine.
‘crying again’
When Strizko spoke about her experience with her captive, a thread of both nostalgia and a certain cruelty emerged.
He said the doctor mostly performed his medical duties, but there was a nurse who cursed him in Russian and left food beside his bed, knowing he could not feed himself.
“Then the nurse came back and said ‘You’re all done, then?’ And took the food,” he said.
He was constantly on guard at the hospital, yet the guards themselves may have been frightened.
He recalled how one carried a knife through his skin but never dropped it, making chilling threats: ‘I would rather cut off your ears or cut you off like Ukrainians bite our prisoners’.
What Strizko didn’t know, but would soon learn, was that his time in Russia would be brief.
The ambulance carrying them to Taganrog was actually on its way to an airport. Within hours he was in the air with other wounded and detainees, whose hands were tied and whose eyes were covered with duct tape.
Once on land in Crimea they learned that they would be exchanged. It was April 28.
The Russians took him and three other seriously injured Ukrainians to an unknown site of the exchange. There was a distance of about a kilometer (about half a mile) between the two sides.
“When we went through that one kilometer I was so scared because who knows what could happen? They could cancel the whole thing,” Strezko said. But soon he got on a Ukrainian bus and had tears in his eyes.
His mother had an idea it was coming, but no details until Vereshchuk called with the news.
“I dropped my phone. And started crying again,” she said.
(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)