A former POW who was tortured by the Russians for months and listened to inmates' screams says he will now return to the frontlines.
Ukrainian soldier Svyatoslav Yermonov lost nearly five stone while in captivity in a prison camp run by Moscow's forces.
The ex-police officer, 33, was released after 16 weeks as part of a prisoner exchange.
Yermonov had been fighting invaders in the decimated port city Mariupol and was captured after being cornered in the fortress Azovstal steelworks.
The dad-of-one was taken to the notorious Olenivka prison in the separatist Donetsk People's Republic (DPR).
He remembered prisoners begging guards: "Shoot me, just stop torturing me."
POWs were forced to drink filthy water and eat boiling hot gruel within a minute, with 200 inmates crammed into cell blocks riddled with lice.
Officials even cruelly told Yermonov's family he was dead.
Referring to the hot gruel, Yermonov told the Sun: "You were given just one minute to eat it. It was a very deliberate choice between burning your mouth and throat or starving.
He added: "If you kept eating after the minute ran out, you were beaten and forced to duck-walk 200 metres to the barracks."
The filthy water also left the men suffering diarrhoea and stomach cramps.
Yermonov said several prisoners would be forced to use the same bar of soap and initially had to sleep on a bare concrete floor.
The camp was hit by a missile in July that killed at leasts 50 POWs, with Ukraine accusing Russia of staging the strike to "cover up" the horrific tortures within.
President Volodymyr Zelensky called it a “deliberate Russian war crime".
Yermonov recalled the prisoners hearing a shell being fired from close by followed by an explosion, and said "none of us had any doubts" about it being the Russians who were behind it.
After losing hope of being released, he suddenly found himself among 215 POWs - including five Brits - who were used as part of a swap deal on September 21.
Yermonov was taken out of the barracks one morning blind folded and thrown into a truck with dozens of others, screaming out in pain as he was crushed at the bottom of the heap.
They were driven for eight hours to an unknown location and then flown to Moscow, then Rostov.
It wasn't until they reached Belarus they realised they were in a prison swap.
"It is hard to put into words the feelings that overwhelmed me when I saw the Ukrainian flag," he said.
