“Everything will be all right.”
Ukrainian soldier Serhii Hryhoriev said this so often during brief phone calls from the front that his wife and two daughters took it to heart. His younger daughter, Oksana, tattooed the phrase on her wrist as a talisman.
Even after Hryhoriev was captured by the Russian army in 2022, his anxious family clung to the belief that he would ultimately be OK. After all, Russia is bound by international law to protect prisoners of war.
When Hryhoriev finally came home, though, it was in a body bag.
A Russian death certificate said the 59-year-old died of a stroke. But a Ukrainian autopsy and a former POW who was detained with him tell a different story about how he died – one of violence and medical neglect at the hands of his captors.
Hryhoriev is one of more than 200 Ukrainian POWs who have died while imprisoned since Russia’s full-scale invasion three years ago. Abuse inside Russian prisons was likely a contributing factor in many of these deaths, according to officials from human rights groups, the U.N., the Ukrainian government and a Ukrainian medical examiner who has performed dozens of POW autopsies.
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