‘Worse than hell’: Castrated Ukrainian soldier details months of torture as a prisoner of war

A Ukrainian soldier who was castrated by Russians while they held him prisoner has opened up about the horrifying torture.

A house destroyed by an earlier Russian missile attack, in the town of Kramatorsk, Donetsk Region, on June 19, 2023, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Picture: Genya Savilov / AFP

A Ukrainian soldier who was castrated with a knife while being held by the Russians as a prisoner of war has described the brutal torture he endured in captivity as “worse than hell”.

The 28-year-old man, who was a prisoner-of-war for three months alongside a 25-year-old Ukrainian, was one of several survivors referred to psychologist Anzhelika Yatsenko after being released in a prisoner swap.

Ms Yatsenko has outlined the torture some of her patients endured at the hands of Russian soldiers in a harrowing new report that details the impacts of sexual violence against men in the Ukraine war.

At first, the soldiers were unable to tell their psychologist, who specialises in troubled young men, what had happened to them while they were captured, she told the Sunday Times.

“I knew from previous cases they had probably been tortured,” Ms Yatsenko said.

“As someone who gets referred the hardest cases, mostly men under 35, it’s very hard to surprise me.”

But when Ms Yatsenko, who works in Poltava, finally learned that the 25 and 28-year old had been castrated with a knife, she said the details were so disturbing that she struggled to act professionally, The Times reported.

“It was the first time I behaved not like a professional psychologist,” she told the outlet.

“I’d never heard anything so horrible. I told them I needed the bathroom and went and cried and cried. I didn’t want them to see as they might think there’s no hope.”

After savagely beating the two Ukrainian soldiers to within an inch of their life, drunk Russian troops castrated them with a knife.

Ms Yatsenko told The Times that the pair had become suicidal and the younger one had already tried to take his own life.

“One of them told me, ‘I don’t know how I am still alive, there was so much blood, I thought I’d die of blood poisoning’,” she said.

“And of course it’s not just the physical damage. Imagine, they are young men just starting their sexual life and then in one second it’s all over. They still feel something, all these hormones, but they can’t do anything. They can never be sexually active. For a young man it’s the worst thing to happen.

“Their dignity has been damaged so badly and it’s impossible to forget. The Russians told them, ‘We are doing this so you can’t have kids.’ To me this is genocide.”

According to the psychologist, the oldest of the two soldiers later insisted on returning to the front line “to be away from women”.

A man walks past debris of a house destroyed by an earlier Russian missile attack, in the town of Kramatorsk, Donetsk Region, on June 19, 2023, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Picture: Genya Savilov / AFP

The report comes after a sickening video that purportedly showed a Ukrainian prisoner of war being castrated by a sadistic Russian soldier sent shockwaves around the world last year.

The clip, posted on a pro-Russian account on Telegram, shows a man in a Ukrainian uniform pinned down with his mouth gagged, and his hands tied behind his back, while a man in a Russian camouflage uses what appears to be bolt cutters to remove his genitalia, before throwing the body part away.

The barbaric footage first emerged in 2022 on several Russian Telegram channels as a sick warning to Ukrainian mothers not to send their sons to war, the Kyiv Post said.

Two soldiers who appear in the clip speak in Russian and stand near a car with the capital letter Z, the symbol used for the Kremlin’s troops, the New York Post reported. The victim can be seen bound and bloodied with his backside exposed while he is being tortured and then killed.

“After the torture, he was shot dead and his body dragged through the streets on a rope,” the war news site Ukraine Watch said Friday of a second part of the video, which it — and news.com.au — chose not to share.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Picture: Sergei Chuzavkov / AFP

Mikhailo Podolyak, a journalist, negotiator and adviser to the Ukrainian president, was among local officials who confirmed the authenticity of the video, vowing to “identify and get to each” of the invading “executioners.”

He said “the world has to realise” that Russia is “a country of cannibals who enjoy torture and murder.”

It is not clear when or where the video was filmed.

News.com.au has not independently verified the footage, however, Aric Toler, from investigative website Bellingcat which successfully identified the Salisbury poisoners, told The Times that the video is likely genuine.

“The same soldier appeared on a Russian TV clip (with same hat and bracelet) and there was no evidence the video had been manipulated,” Mr Toler said in July last year.

Paul Massaro, a senior policy adviser for the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, said at the time the “sickening evil committed by the Russian invaders” should be a message for the world to “help Ukraine end it.”

“The barbarity and depravity of the Russian invaders is revolting. Castration, murder, rape, killing children, levelling cities. Unmitigated evil,” he tweeted.

John Spencer, the US Army veteran who chairs the Washington, DC-based Urban Warfare Studies, also implored world leaders to act.

“I just watched the video showing Russian soldiers cutting off the genitalia of Ukrainian POWs. How do you unsee that? WTF are we waiting on to halt this evil?” he wrote.

There are varying reports about who the Russian soldier is, as well as where and when the alleged incident took place.

The Twitter account Ukraine Alert, which tweets updates about the war, identified the soldier as “probably” a member of the Wagner group of mercenaries fighting alongside Moscow’s forces in Ukraine, who is from the republic of Kalmykia.

Ukraine Alert pointed out that other sources had said the video was of mercenaries from the Chechen Akhmat battalion.

Several other outlets reported that the Russian appeared to be the same soldier who appeared in a broadcast on Russian state-backed media at the Azot chemical plant in the city of Severodonetsk, Luhansk.

Retired Australian general Mick Ryan tweeted that while he did not want to amplify a “hideous and repulsive act against a defenceless Ukrainian prisoner of war … from a purely human level, I am sickened that one human will do this to another.

“Second, as a soldier, it breaks my heart to see a fellow soldier – now a non-combatant – being treated in such a way. No soldier deserves such disgusting treatment,” he added.