Volodymyr Mykolayenko, the former mayor of the Ukrainian city of Kherson, spent more than three years in Russian captivity.
Abducted by Russian operatives in April 2022 during the first weeks of Moscow's full-scale invasion, he disappeared without trace until Kyiv confirmed his release in a prisoner exchange on August 24 -- Ukrainian Independence Day.
Now 65, he is thin, frail, and recovering, but his spirit remains unbroken even if he is still getting accustomed to his newfound freedom.
"For years I saw nothing but bars and concrete," he told RFE/RL's Crimea.Realities in Kyiv weeks after his release. "The first thing I noticed was the green, our trees in bloom. I'm thankful for this gift."
Mykolayenko lost 25 kilograms while in captivity, but he is already talking about returning to work, either to help rebuild Kherson or to contribute to efforts to bring home other Ukrainian prisoners.
From Mayor to Defender
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, Mykolayenko was 62. A longtime politician, city councilor, and former mayor of Kherson (2014–2020), he chose to enlist with the Territorial Defense rather than remain on the sidelines.
He recalls being handed weapons near Naddnipryanske, by the Antonivskiy Bridge -- a vital road crossing over the Dnieper River that links Kherson to the river’s east bank -- as Russian artillery pounded the approaches to the city.
Ukrainian guns fired back, aiming to disrupt the crossing and perhaps even damage the bridge. “To my surprise,” Mykolayenko said, “not one bridge in the Kherson region was destroyed...”
The only exception came further east, where 23-year-old soldier Vitaliy Skakun blew up the Henichesk road bridge at the cost of his own life, slowing down a Russian column.
Despite the Ukrainian defiance, however, Russian armored forces advanced toward Kherson with startling speed.
"They came very fast. It felt like the road had been cleared for them, only a red carpet was missing," Mykolayenko said. To this day, he remains convinced that collaborators must have facilitated their entry.
Within days, however, Kherson civilians had mounted their own form of resistance to the Russian occupiers -- unarmed mass protests.
In early March 2022, thousands confronted armed Russian soldiers with chants of "Glory to Ukraine!" and "Shame!"
The largest rally followed on March 13.
"I'd never seen that many people, even in Soviet times," Mykolayenko says. "I believed Kherson wouldn't submit, but the numbers, ten thousand, maybe more, took my breath away."
'Armed Men Threw Me In The Trunk'
In April, with Russian troops still in control of the city, Mykolayenko was lured into what he calls "a trap."
A man claiming to be from the Territorial Defense insisted that he had sensitive information, which had to be passed on to Ukrainian authorities, so Mykolayenko arranged to meet him at an agreed location.
"A car came at speed," he says. "Armed men threw me in the trunk and drove me to a police station already turned into a torture chamber."
After his initial detention in Kherson, Mykolayenko was transferred to Sevastopol in Russian-occupied Crimea, then to Borisoglebsk in Russia's Voronezh region, where he spent five months.
He was eventually sent to a penal colony in Pakino in the Vladimir region some 200 kilometers east of Moscow in October 2022 and he remained there until his release last month.
He says conditions at the facility were brutal and his time in custody was marked by relentless physical and psychological abuse.
"Beatings, interrogations, humiliation -- around the clock," he recalls. "You stand, they tell you to put your hand against the wall, you put your hand against the wall, and they hit you with a rubber baton on that hand. You can't even eat, it's swollen. Then they...hit you on your heels so you can't walk."
"Once I was fed up and said something [to a Russian soldier], so every time he would hit me on the head with a wooden mallet. He was full of anger, and then he ran an electric stun gun over my body in a circle. And he screamed, you know, like he got some kind of sexual pleasure from this."
Plagued By Hunger
It is also not surprising that Mykolayenko lost so much weight in captivity, given that he and his fellow captives were constantly plagued by hunger.
"Lunch was a bowl of murky slop," he says. "Once I was lucky: seven grains of barley fell into my bowl. 'You're the champion,' they joked. You didn't need a spoon, as you took six, seven gulps and it was gone. The 'second course' was boiled potato peels. A piece of bread, that’s what kept you from dying of hunger."
On rare "walks" in a concrete yard, Mykolayenko and fellow prisoners collected nettles sprouting through cracks in the pavement.
"We ate them just to get some sort of vitamins," he says.
Everywhere Mykolayenko was held, he says he was pressured by his captors to collaborate with Moscow against Ukraine, but that he was able to resist their violent overtures.
Others were not so lucky.
"Unfortunately, some broke," he says softly. "They cut their wrists, throats, and hanged themselves....Some of them were so broken that they wet themselves, soiled themselves from the beatings. They could not bear it."
'Mom, I Love You Very Much'
Although Mykolayenko's name first appeared on prisoner exchange lists in the spring of 2022, more than three long years elapsed before he was finally released.
Once, he says, he was just "a step away from freedom," already dressed and ready to be transferred when he saw another prisoner -- a young man gravely ill and slipping into madness.
Mykolayenko refused to leave, urging his jailers to let his fellow inmate go in his place.
"When it came down to a choice, him or me, I was always going to say, 'take the boy,'" Mykolayenko says. "He had a chance to recover."
When Mykolayenko was eventually set free after three and a half years, his first phone call was to his daughter, who serves in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Only then did he learn that his mother was still alive, turning 91 the next day.
"Mom, I love you very much,” he told her when they eventually spoke.
"We say too few kind words to our families in this life," Mykolayenko says. "It's only when you are there [in captivity] that you understand how dear they are to you."
Although Mykolayenko's hometown of Kherson was retaken in November 2022, the city did not escape unscathed. His mother's home is destroyed, his own apartment damaged.
His family never left the city, however. Throughout his captivity, he had no contact with them and no idea whether they were alive.
Now, after being free for some weeks, Mykolayenko is getting restless. He says he wants to return to Kherson to help rebuild the city or to join efforts to free other prisoners.
"Every day I feel discomfort that the guys are still there and I am free," he says. "I've told Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk that if there's any way to involve me, I'm ready to help, even as a volunteer."
