Vlad, 16, and his father, Oleh Buryak, recounted their ordeal in an interview published on Thursday by Poland’s polskatimes.pl website.
The boy said he was fleeing the city of Melitopol with a group of women when their convoy was stopped at the last Russian checkpoint, in the city of Vasylivka, according to polskatimes.pl.
As the Russian guards checked the refugees’ papers, one of the troops took Vlad’s smartphone. The soldier logged onto a Ukrainian website and spotted a video showing Russian war veterans calling home and asking to be sent back, Vlad told polskatimes.pl.
The guard took issue with the video, pointed his machine gun at the boy and arrested him.
“During the interrogation, they checked his papers and found out he was my son,” Oleh Buryak said, as quoted by polskatimes.pl.
Vlad was taken to prison, where he was forced to work in the kitchen, sweep floors and clean the “torture chamber,” among other tasks, according to polskatimes.pl.
'I witnessed torture'
He said: “I witnessed torture. I heard everything. People were being tortured with electric current, beaten up, had needles stuck under fingernails.”
“A desire to live, to return home and see my parents again helped me survive,” Vlad told polskatimes.pl.
He added that phone calls from his father bolstered his spirits. Oleg Buryak phoned his son regularly, assuring him calmly that he would get out of prison and that “nothing terrible will happen,” polskatimes.pl reported.
“Above all, I wanted to avoid all this torture that was being inflicted on Ukrainian soldiers and ordinary civilians,” Vlad told polskatimes.pl.
“These 90 days seemed like eternity,” he said.
Friday is day 142 of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
(pm/gs)
Source: polskatimes.pl, polsatnews.pl