Sabsi

Russia gave him a choice — betray Ukraine or die in prison. Volodymyr Mykolayenko, the former mayor of Kherson, refused to serve the occupiers and spent more than three years in russian captivity, where he was beaten with batons and fists and tortured with electric shocks from the very first day. When russia invaded in 2022, Mykolayenko joined the territorial defense forces. A few weeks later, he was abducted, stuffed into a car trunk, and transferred through prisons in Crimea, as well as in the Voronezh and Vladimir regions. The torture did not stop for a single day. For every word spoken in Ukrainian, he was beaten. Prisoners were fed potato peels, watery soup, and a single piece of bread per day. For vitamins, they gathered nettles growing by the fence. In the morning, the guards played Orthodox sermons on the radio; in the evening, they tortured the prisoners. Russian officers offered him money, safety, and any position he wanted in the occupation administration. He refused. They lined him up against a wall and staged a mock execution. “I told them I have two grandsons — they will continue my life,” he recalls. In 2022, Mykolayenko refused early release so that a gravely ill young prisoner could take his place. Later, he accidentally overheard from an investigator that Kherson had been liberated. “That was the day I truly felt free,” he says. On August 24, 2025 — Ukraine’s Independence Day — he was freed during a prisoner exchange. He returned exhausted but unbroken. His mother’s home was destroyed, and his own apartment damaged. “I will return to Kherson — to rebuild it and to defend it again, if necessary.” Source: translated and adopted from Tymofiy Mylovanov