‘Some never came back’: how Russians hunted down veterans of Donbas conflict

‘They beat us savagely for days.’ Viktor Kushyn, 59, a forklift driver and Donbas veteran, at his house in Pisky-Radkivski. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian

Viktor Kushyn knew Russian soldiers were after him. He sensed it from the first day of Moscow’s full-scale war on Ukraine in February last year, when Russians occupied his village in the Kharkiv region.

So when two Russian service personnel stopped him in the street one morning in May 2022, he didn’t resist. He spent the next few days locked in a cellar with other men who, like him, had fought against Russian-backed separatists between 2014 and 2022 in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.