Russian soldiers carved swastikas into the foreheads of two Ukrainian prisoners of war, leaving them struggling with severe psychological trauma, doctors told The Telegraph.
Serhiy doesn’t know what Russian soldiers used to mutilate him because his eyes were blindfolded with tape. He only knows that the act was carried out with extreme cruelty.
“I want your children to know that you’re fascist. That’s why I am cutting deep,” the soldier told him. “So it’s visible on your bones.”
Hot blood streamed down Serhiy’s face, but he was given nothing to clean himself or any medical care for his multiple injuries.
The act, a war crime, was likely inspired by Moscow’s claims that its
war in Ukraine is a special “deNazification” operation.
Mobilised into the Ukrainian military not long after Russia invaded, Serhiy was captured after a fierce skirmish last December in the Donetsk region. His captors took him to a processing centre, where he was subjected to two weeks of torture. They kept him in a basement with no food, only taking him out to beat him unconscious.
The swastika runs from just below his hairline to almost his brow and was likely cut with a knife, his doctors believe.
Soon after, he was transferred to Chechnya, where he arrived almost naked and covered in layers of dried blood, and released five months later in a prisoner exchange. A year on from his capture, the psychological scars still run so deep that Serhiy finds it almost impossible to talk about what happened to him.
The physical marks left behind are harder to hide, however. He covers his face with a baseball cap and rarely removes it. The swastika mark weighs heavy on him psychologically – a symbol loaded with harmful meaning and social stigma.
“It reminds him every day of the torture he experienced,” said his wife, Olha.
“I don’t understand the logic in what they did because his children
hate the Russians for what they’ve done,” said Olha. The couple, who are both 40 and from Vinnytsia, met at pre-school and have two teenage children together – they did not want to use their full names due to the sensitive nature of the injury. “They don’t think he’s a fascist, he’s a hero.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-n...-carved-two-ukrainians-russians-mental-knife/