Boris Semenov (not his real name) from Bucha, Ukraine had an experience at the hands of the Russian invaders that’s so foreign to us in the West that it’s hard for us to process. Still, his story is worth knowing for the insight it gives into what Ukraine is up against.
I interviewed Semenov recently in a Kyiv police station. He wasn’t there as a prisoner, but rather as a man who was part of a prisoner exchange. He was there because the Ukrainian police participated in conducting the prisoner exchange.
Semenov is Ukrainian, but he’s ethnically Russian and grew up speaking Russian. He’s 49 years old, and his lined, haggard face, greying hair, and stiff movements make him appear in his 80s. He’s probably 20 pounds underweight, and his breathing looks labored.
“Shortly after the Russians occupied my town”, he begins the interview, “my friend and I went to look for water in our village.”
He needed to get water because one of the first things the Russian invaders did when they occupied Bucha was shot up the water pipes, rendering them inoperable. “As we were walking along a village road,” he continued, “we suddenly came across four Russian soldiers. They pointed their guns at us and ordered us to strip to our underwear and lie on the ground. It was 20 degrees.”
Semenov is silent a moment and then continues. “They began calling us Nazis. I tried to explain to them that I wasn’t a Nazi.”
As Semenov tells it, one of the four soldiers didn’t appreciate his arguing, and with the butt of his submachine gun struck Semenov in the face, knocking out four of his teeth. The Russians tied his hands behind his back and then wrapped duct tape around his head, covering his eyes.
The Russians brought Semenov and his friend to an interrogation center, where half a dozen Ukrainians were already being held. Semenov was still blindfolded, but he could hear that everyone ahead of him was being asked the same questions. One of the interrogators in a Chechnian accent demanded: “Where is Ukrainian army? Where are biological weapons?”
When each of the people ahead of him didn’t give the answer the interrogators apparently wanted, Semenov would hear a gunshot and screams.
Then it came his turn. He felt the cold tip of a pistol against his temple. Desperately he told his interrogator that he didn’t know anything about the military and that he was just a civilian.
His tormentors weren’t satisfied with his answer. “A guy fired a shot past my ear, and at the same moment, another gave me a horrendous slap on the temple. I knew I had been shot.”
However, he hadn’t been shot. It was just a way to gratuitously terrify him. After 24 hours of captivity, Boris and his friend were released, and they headed back to their village and safety. However, they didn’t make it home.
“As we were walking, we saw a column with 15 light tanks, and several armored personnel carriers,” he remembered. “They were having lunch like a picnic on the ground.”
The Russians waved to the two Ukrainians, indicating that they should approach. Their leader used his cell to call someone, and Semenov heard him say, “We just picked up a couple of Ukrainian clowns. Are you aware of them? Yes? What do you want us to do with them?”
The answer turned out to be to return Semenov and his friend to captivity. “They covered our eyes again,” Semenov said. He was already in agony from having lost four teeth, but now a man, seemingly for the sport of it, had him lie face down on the ground, spread eagle, and kicked him in the ribs, eventually breaking three ribs on each side.
Semenov and his friend were taken to Russia, where they were kept in prison for two months. For the first six weeks, they were given one meal a day and were starving. But then suddenly conditions changed. They were given plenty of food. They kept wondering why everything was changing.
On April 27th, a little more than eight weeks after his ordeal began, Semenov was put on a plane to Belarus, and eventually to Zaporizhia where he and several other Ukrainians were exchanged for an equal number of Russian soldiers.
Boris winds up his story with a long, deep sigh, and says, “I am ethnically Russian, I’ve always been proud that I’m Russian, but now I’m ashamed that I was Russian. I’m learning to speak Ukrainian now.”
Russia regularly rounds up civilians from Ukraine and uses them to exchange for Russian POWs. It’s an ugly dance in which the Russians kidnap Ukrainians to exchange them for Russian POWs.
The practice needs to be condemned globally. Capturing civilians to use them for prisoner exchange is a war crime and can be prosecuted in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
To quote from Justice Robert Jackson, speaking at the 1945 Nuremburg Trials, “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.” Let’s have justice for the innocent victims or Russia’s war on Ukraine.
