When Yuriy Merkotan enlisted in Ukraine’s national guard in 2020, it was not because he wanted to fight. A saxophonist living in the southern port city of Mariupol, there were few opportunities to play music professionally. So when a spot became free in a 16-person band attached to a national guard brigade, he jumped at the chance.
But when Russian forces put Mariupol under siege in February 2022, the band members were called to duty. They ended up inside Azovstal, the sprawling factory that became the last bastion of Ukrainian defence as the Russian occupation proceeded to its grim conclusion.
When Ukrainian forces in Azovstal laid down their arms in May 2022, Merkotan and other musicians were among more than 2,000 Ukrainians taken into Russian captivity.
Over 20 months in Russian prisons, he lost nearly 60kg of body weight, and was subjected to a gruesome routine of physical and psychological torment.
He was freed in January this year, but the story of his time in Russian captivity shines a light on the grim conditions faced by thousands of Ukrainians taken prisoner by Russia over the past two years. It also serves as a reminder that 23 musicians, from three Mariupol ensembles, remain in Russian captivity, as the two-year anniversary of the Russian takeover of the city approaches next week.
“I tried to explain that I was a musician but it didn’t work. You say you are a musician and it irritates them so much they beat you more, and accuse you of lying,” said Merkotan, during an interview in a Kyiv cafe.
Before Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Merkotan’s 16-person national guard orchestra played ceremonial marches at military parades, and toured Donetsk region giving concerts of popular music covers at public events or old-people’s homes.
After the start of hostilities, the musicians were put in charge of bringing food and supplies to other parts of the national guard stationed in the huge territory of Azovstal. It was a dangerous job that involved scarpering above ground with heavy barrels and boxes, moving quickly enough to evade the incoming fire that inevitably followed as soon as they made an appearance. The band’s drummer was killed in an airstrike inside Azovstal; the trombonist, who is also Merkotan’s brother-in-law, was wounded.
Eventually, 10 musicians from the band ended up in Russian captivity. For the first months, they were mostly held in crowded barracks in the town of Olenivka, in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine. Drinking water came straight from the river and sometimes had a greenish tinge; food was served piping hot and with a window of a couple of minutes to wolf it down, forcing hungry prisoners either to burn their mouths or abstain.
One hot day in the summer of 2022, Merkotan’s name was called and he was put on a bus with other prisoners. “We didn’t know where they were taking us. Three guys came in with weapons and were aggressive, shouting at us that we are scum and that if we make any move they’ll kill us,” he said. It turned out that Merkotan was among 60 men picked for the unenviable task of exhuming bodies of those who died in shelling and airstrikes in Mariupol, and had been buried in makeshift graves. For a month, he was driven daily to the occupied city and forced to dig at gunpoint.
“My team dug up 200 bodies at least. It was August, hot, and the smell was disgusting. Surprisingly, nobody vomited. I guess the stress was too much, but we all got terrible diarrhoea. On the fourth day, I stopped eating because as soon as you ate you had to run to the toilet,” he recalled.
At the beginning of October, he was blindfolded and put in a prison truck. After hours of driving along bumpy roads, he was pushed on to a plane, the first time in his life he had taken a flight. Although he remained blindfolded and handcuffed, he assumed the movement meant he would be exchanged. Instead, after landing and another truck ride, the barking of dogs and coarse Russian shouting informed him he was back at a prison. It was only later, from ink stamps on the bed sheets, that he found out the location: Borisoglebsk, in Russia’s Voronezh region.
The humiliations of Russian prison made Merkotan miss the conditions back in occupied Ukraine. At Borisoglebsk, prisoners were forbidden from sitting or lying between 6am and 10pm, when they were forced to stand up in their cells. Many developed serious leg injuries. The speaker system played the same few recorded radio programmes about Ukrainian Nazis over and over again.
Twice a day, the inmates had to assemble in the corridor, face against the wall and legs apart as wide as they could manage. They were then assaulted by guards who beat them with rubber truncheons, and sometimes used handheld electric shockers.
“They beat you until you had huge bruises, then they specially beat you on the bruises … There were times that they hit us so much, I remember I was looking around for pieces of glass to slice my veins with. You just can’t last that long for so many months without starting to go crazy,” he said.
During the daily beating ritual, the men were forced to recite poems begging forgiveness from the “fraternal Russians” for Ukraine’s errant ways. They had to memorise the poems, and were beaten harder if they forgot lines or if the guards considered they were not putting enough emotion into them.
Months later, Merkotan could still remember the long poems by heart. One fragment went: “There is no Ukraine without Russia / It’s as pointless as a lock without a key / We are all one family, even if we argued / But arguments can happen in a family.”
Every now and then, Merkotan was brought to an interrogation where the questions were always the same: Do you know any Nazis? Do you know any nationalists? Do you have any information about Ukrainian war crimes?
“Every time, you say ‘I don’t know,’ then they beat you and tell you to remember … One time there was a guy with a shocker who put me on the floor and shocked me right on the arsehole. Every time, I would scream ‘Please no,’ he would stop, and then start again,” he recalled.
After some months, Merkotan was moved to another prison in the same town, where the conditions were slightly better and the men were allowed to sit. Then, in January this year, he was told he would be exchanged. The blindfold went on again and he was put in a bus that drove in what he assumed was the direction of the border with Ukraine. But after some hours, the bus stopped, then turned around. When they stopped later, one of the Russian guards began punching him hard, breaking his jaw in two places. “That’s for what your guys did,” the man shouted.
The swap, he later found out, had been cancelled after a transport plane that Russia claimed was carrying dozens of prisoners meant to be exchanged was shot down by a Ukrainian missile. Much about the incident remains murky and disputed. A week later, he was taken from the prison again and this time the exchange went ahead, with Merkotan one of about 200 Ukrainians heading home.
It was not possible to verify all the details of Merkotan’s testimony, but Ukrainian rights groups who work with returning prisoners of war say that almost all report mistreatment and physical abuse in Russian captivity.
Back in Ukraine, Merkotan had an operation to repair his jaw and entered a weeks-long rehabilitation programme. He had shrunk from 130kg before the war to 73kg at the moment of his exchange. For now, he seems to be doing better psychologically than many returned prisoners, although he conceded that he can still have unpredictable reactions to phrases or situations that trigger memories of his time in Russia.
“I nearly had a heart attack in the hospital recently when they started attaching leads to me,” he said, explaining that the painless medical test had brought back memories of being electrocuted.
Merkotan has been reunited with his wife, Anastasia, a music teacher he met when the pair were both music students in the city of Donetsk a decade ago. While he was in captivity, Anastasia had started a project named “Bring the Band Home”, dedicated to returning the musicians held in Russian captivity, from Yuriy’s orchestra and two other military-linked ensembles that had been in Mariupol. She said there is little or no information about many of the 23 musicians remaining in Russian captivity.
“They are musicians, not combatants, and we call on all artists and musicians to help us bring them home,” she said.
