Ukrainian paratrooper Oleksandr Mashonkin (pictured) was captured after the hellish fighting at the Donetsk airport in January -- and thrust into another nightmare. The "cyborg," who was released in a prisoner exchange after 197 days in captivity in Donetsk, says he and fellow prisoners were beaten with “pipes, stools, table legs” and even a cross wielded by a priest.
RFE/RL's Halyna Tereshchuk and Robert Coalson recount Mashonkin's story here
RFE/RL's Russian Service has issued a video of Oleh Sentsov in court today:
Russian prosecutors are seeking a 23-year prison sentence for Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, a vocal opponent of Russia's annexation of Crimea, on charges of conspiracy to commit terrorist attacks. Speaking during his trial in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, Sentsov described the Russian government as "a criminal regime."
Could this give some more impetus to diplomatic efforts to end the crisis? Or would it just be good PR for the Kremlin?
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on August 19 that Putin would "positively" consider a request from Washington to meet.
Relations between Russia and the West are at a post-Cold War low because of Moscow's forcible seizure of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and Russia's involvement in the fighting in eastern Ukraine.
Moscow denies arming separatists fighting against Ukrainian troops or having any Russian troops in Ukraine, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
More than 6,400 people have been killed in eastern Ukraine since fighting began 16 months ago.
Obama thanked Putin via phone for Moscow's part in agreeing to a nuclear deal with Iran in July.
The two last met face-to-face in November, and Putin has not made any official visits to the United States since returning as president for a third term in mid-2012.
(Reuters, AFP)
RFE/RL's Halyna Tereshchuk and Robert Coalson have published a harrowing account of a Ukrainian soldier Oleksandr Mashonkin's time as a separatist prisoner.
The first days of captivity were the worst, Mashonkin says, especially after the "cyborgs" spent a day under the control of the notorious separatist commander Arseny Pavlov, aka Motorola.
"They'd take a few of us away and beat them," Mashonkin tells RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service. "Then they'd bring them back and take away someone else. This lasted all day. They beat everyone -- with pipes, stools, table legs. They beat us all over -- on the head, all over the body, in the groin."
"Eventually, the pain stopped -- they were beating us so badly that they were just breaking things that were already broken."
At one point, Mashonkin says, the men were even beaten by an Orthodox priest.
"When we were with Motorola, a priest appeared -- apparently from the Moscow Patriarchate -- with a cross. He beat us on the head with that cross. Maybe he thought it would drive out our sins," Mashonkin remembers. "He said that we were not human. A priest in a cassock with a cross. And when the wooden cross broke over someone's head, he came back with a metal one. I've seen priests like that only in horror films."
Read the entire article here