“Can they really be called normal people?” The story of Marine Ivan Nakonechny from Mariupol, who spent more than three years in captivity
Source: Novynarnia
Author: Alina Logvinenko
“Russians are inhuman, sadists”—with these words, Marine Ivan Nakonechny begins his speech at the Ukrainian panel during the World Economic Forum in Davos. He is visibly nervous, trying to say as much as possible within the allotted time. But is it even possible to fit everything he has experienced, seen, and felt over the past few years into a few minutes?
Three years and five months—that is exactly how long Nakonechny, a soldier in the 1st Separate Battalion of the 36th Separate Marine Brigade and a defender of Mariupol, was held captive by the Russians. Ivan was released in a prisoner exchange on October 2, 2025. Hundreds of his brothers and sisters in arms remain captives of the occupiers to this day, enduring brutal torture, interrogations, and psychological torment every day.
Ivan spoke about this during a panel discussion in Davos dedicated to sharing experiences of Russian captivity. The international community must hear this harsh truth. It must be heard not only to express sympathy, but first and foremost to respond and fight for the liberation of our prisoners of war, who are being illegally held by Russia in inhumane conditions.
Next—Ivan Nakonechny’s story. About the defense of Mariupol, his captivity, the ordeals he endured, and the genocide of Ukrainians in Russian torture chambers.
A Decision That Changed His Life
In 2016, Ivan was graduating from a railway technical college in Mykolaiv; he was planning to find a job and, in general, live a normal life. One day, while discussing plans with a friend, he heard that his friend was planning to join the army, to which Ivan replied that he’d go anywhere but the army—he definitely didn’t want to join.
But shortly after that conversation, Nakonechny went to the military registration and enlistment office, passed a medical examination, and then underwent brief training at a training center. And just a few weeks later, he was standing before the command post of the 1st Separate Marine Battalion of the 36th Marine Brigade.
“It was a decision that even I still can’t explain to myself. I just decided—and that was it. I started my service in an airborne assault company as a regular rifleman. Then I became a senior rifleman-medic and a squad leader. And in 2019, a comrade suggested I transfer to the reconnaissance platoon, and I agreed,” Ivan says.
In reconnaissance, I served as a combat medic for some time, then took on the role of squad leader. And at the same time—since a scout must know and be able to do everything—he flew drones. Over the course of several years, he managed to complete seven training courses abroad.
Most of Ivan’s unit’s rotations took place in the Mariupol sector: Vodyane, Chermalyk, Maloyanisol. Since 2019—Pavlopil. In fact, it was there that Ivan encountered Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The First Days of the Full-Scale
Invasion The escalation in the Donbas began about a week before February 24. In the Mariupol sector, Russian forces stepped up their activity on the 21st. At 1:00 a.m. on February 25, Ivan was woken up with the words: “It’s started.”
“From that moment on, fighting raged. Tanks, ‘Grad’ rockets… I remember we sent two soldiers to the evacuation point. They were coming back, and right before my eyes, a Grad rocket fell in front of them, ricocheted, and flew off to the side. They just froze. It was like something out of a movie. On February 27, we retreated from the outskirts of Pavlopil to Orlovskoye, where we held our ground—but not for long. Heavy shelling began; we suffered our first casualties; it was difficult to hold our defenses in an open field. On top of that, our left flank was crumbling. On the morning of February 28, we were ordered to load up into the vehicles. We’d previously received information from unofficial sources that we were heading to Zaporizhzhia. “But I was so cold then—I hadn’t had time to grab any warm clothes because it was such chaos. I lay down in the back of the APC and fell asleep, trying to warm up,” Ivan recalls.
When he woke up, the vehicles were already approaching the drop-off point. Ivan looked around, taking in the familiar scenery. The destination turned out to be the Ilyich Iron and Steel Works in Mariupol.
The Defense of “Ilyich”
The scouts’ first tasks were to locate communications lines, alternate routes, approaches and escape routes, conduct ground and aerial reconnaissance, evacuate the wounded, and, of course, contain the enemy. They also attempted to penetrate behind enemy lines to gather intelligence on enemy movements.
The situation was complicated by the fact that the Russians had a significant advantage in manpower and virtually unlimited ammunition. The defenders of “Ilyich” could not boast of the same. The shortage of personnel was critical; artillerymen, cooks, and the band—anyone who could handle a weapon—were drawn into infantry combat.
We were almost out of ammunition.
“One day, aerial reconnaissance spotted a concentration of Russians—about a battalion’s worth, several hundred men. The battalion commander got so fired up, saying we had to take them out. We called in tanks; they drove up, fired a couple of shots, and missed… Well, we had nothing else to shoot with. The artillery couldn’t operate either due to a lack of mines and shells. It was the same story with small arms—when we ran out of 7.62-caliber rounds, we switched to the AKS and, accordingly, to 5.45-caliber rounds. Eventually, we started using tracer rounds. And even then, we followed the principle: if I can’t see it, I don’t shoot. We let the enemy get as close as possible to get a shot off. Our anti-tank troops did a tremendous amount of work back then; they’d run right up in front of Russian vehicles and take them out while they still had ammunition. And a great many of them died there.
“At Azovstal, helicopters dropped whatever aid they could. Nothing arrived at Ilyich,” says the Marine.
Ivan carried out his missions as part of groups defending the approaches to the plant. The guys tried to do everything in their power—even the impossible—to stop the enemy’s advance.
“However, when the Russians began forming columns just a few hundred meters away—when we saw them and couldn’t do anything because we had no weapons—it became clear that the situation was very dire. You know, now that more than three years have passed, it’s easy to speculate on what we should have done back then. But under those circumstances, we did everything we could.
When it comes to Mariupol, I want to point out that we shouldn’t single out any one unit. For a machine to work, all the parts have to be in place, right? The Marines, “Azov,” border guards, National Guard troops, the 56th Brigade, and other units of the Defense Forces—they were all in their places, and they all played an important role.”
The Breakout Attempt and Capture
According to Ivan, the first order to move from the MMK to “Azovstal” came on April 7. At 6:00 p.m., the order was given to pack up, but at 10:00 p.m., the mission was canceled for some reason. At that point, the distance between our defenders and the Russians at the Illich Steel Plant was minimal.
“We’d already grown close to one another. There had been a lot of fighting. Well, basically, we were calculating how much longer we could hold out and what we could do. It was clear that our days were numbered. We came up with several options, including a breakthrough to Azovstal and into territory controlled by Ukraine. I was leaning toward the second option. There’s occupied Mariupol, with ‘Azovstal’ and ‘Ilyich’ inside it. “What’s the point of moving from one ‘canned food can’—where we’re trapped—to essentially the same thing?” Ivan asks rhetorically.
The breakout was supposed to take place on the night of April 10–11, 2022.
“Everyone was briefed on the route plans and the contact information for the people who were supposed to meet us. The guides, the points where we were to disperse, the order in which the convoy would depart—all of this was organized and planned in detail. But almost immediately, everything ‘fell apart.’ In the evening, tracked vehicles entered the area, and a field hospital with the wounded was moved to our bunker. It’s 1:00 a.m.—there’s no order to depart. And the brigade commander isn’t there… But the convoy is—everyone’s gathered, standing, waiting. Can you imagine what it’s like to turn a convoy around?! Of course, the Russians caught on, scrambled their planes, deployed every weapon at their disposal, and rained down a barrage of fire on the convoy. There were a great many casualties… Those who could made it back to the “Ilyich.” The battalion commander tried to resolve the situation and organize our defenses, but it’s clear that once a position has been lost, it’s very difficult to regain it—and in our situation, it didn’t seem possible at all,” the soldier explains.
The following night, a second attempt was made to escape from the plant. The marines left in separate groups—some were breaking through toward “Azovstal,” while others, like Ivan and his comrades, were trying to escape from the occupied territory. However, they didn’t get very far. On April 16, 2022, the Russians took them prisoner.
Prisoners in Occupied Donetsk
Oblast “And so began my arduous journey,”—Ivan utters this brief preamble to his years of captivity with a certain irony. Its source, however, is not flippancy, but tremendous self-control.
Ivan’s group was taken to the occupied village of Nikolskoye in the Mariupol district, where the first interrogations took place. Then they were transferred to the Donetsk Organized Crime Control Department.
“That’s where the beatings began. They drove a knife into the shoulder of one of our comrades from the battalion. Some of the guys were as black as the earth and beaten like dogs. They didn’t feed us, and there was almost no water. I remember they took us to a hospital for a chest X-ray, lined us up against the wall, and some old woman said, ‘They should all be shot.’ And she was Ukrainian!” recalls Ivan.
The route of our transfers through occupied Donetsk Oblast varied: after the Donetsk Organized Crime Control Department, we were moved to Olenivka; from there, to the Donetsk pretrial detention center; then to Horlivka; and finally to Torez.
With each move, conditions grew worse—unsanitary conditions, poor food.
“In the Donetsk ‘SIZO,’ we spent 60 days in a cell without water. In Horlivka, the ‘intake’ was so brutal that I thought, if this happens every day, I simply won’t survive it. Sanitary conditions were a bit better there, because it was clearly one of the ‘model’ detention centers. We were allowed to visit the bathhouse once a week, and our laundry was washed. Prisoners whose relatives lived in the occupied territories of Donetsk Oblast could receive letters and packages. “It wasn’t just that we didn’t receive anything—for a long time, our families didn’t even know if we were alive,” says Ivan Nakonechny.
Siberia: In the Russian Hell
From Torez, Ivan Nakonechny, along with other prisoners of war, was transported to Russia—all the way to Siberia, to the Altai Krai, in the city of Biysk.
“There I realized: everything they did to me in the ‘DPR’ was child’s play. In Siberia, they destroyed us, reduced us to nothing,” he says.
Beatings, electric shocks, burns from soldering irons, being forced to wear a gas mask while having the air supply cut off—a practice the torturers called “playing elephant”—were daily “procedures.”
Every time you left the cell, it meant only one thing—you would be tortured in one of these ways.
You could only move through the corridors hunched over, with your eyes closed, and escorted by dogs. Hunger and cold were constant companions. The prisoners had no watches, but the daily routine was always the same, so they knew exactly what time it was.
“In the morning, we had calisthenics; we were required to sing the Russian national anthem, then breakfast—if you could call it that. Because usually, ‘food’ consisted of some water flavored with detergent. Then came the beatings. As terrible as it may sound, you got used to being beaten or seeing others beaten. From morning until night, someone was being tortured, and we constantly heard their screams, filled with pain and horror.
They beat us for speaking Ukrainian, for tattoos featuring national symbols or Marine Corps insignia. If they saw a Scandinavian tattoo, they’d call us “Nazis” and beat us again.
They stopped hitting us in the face when they started taking the guys away for prisoner exchanges, so the signs of torture wouldn’t be so obvious. But that doesn’t mean the torture stopped; instead, they started using electric shocks even more—they’d connect cords from “tapiks” to any part of the body. And they usually filmed everything on their phones. “Can you really call them normal people?” the Marine shares his horrific memories.
We were fed Russian propaganda daily: videos with distorted history, Russian news reports full of lies about the course of the war, and, of course, music—they hardly ever turned it off.
The Russian torturers tried to destroy the Ukrainian defenders not only physically; they crushed their will to resist, their human dignity, and their belief that anyone remembered them.
“Yes, we were angry… Because of everything we had to go through, everything we had to endure. We understood that our government had nothing to do with this, that Russia was holding us captive, but it was very difficult to cope with our own emotions and feelings of despair and helplessness. Why am I here, of all people? When will this all end—and will it ever end at all? What if they’ve really forgotten about us? All these questions were constantly on my mind. And the level of inner aggression was immense.
One day, after yet another brutal beating, they threw us into a cell. And there we were, lying there, looking at one another and realizing that through all of this, the Russians were trying to make us just like them—aggressive, intimidated, and numb. And we promised ourselves that we wouldn’t let that happen.
Yes, we couldn’t change reality, but we could still control our own attitude toward it. What did we do? We laughed it off. We talked a lot and supported one another. And we argued—that was inevitable. Because I’m from the Marine Corps, one guy was from “Azov,” and another from the National Guard, and whenever the conversation turned to the events in Mariupol, we had plenty to argue about. But even so, we always remained human,” says Ivan.
The world must act
Ivan was released in a prisoner exchange on October 2, 2025. The comrades with whom he shared a cell remain in captivity to this day. Just like thousands of other Ukrainian citizens.
“Here we are, sitting with you right now, talking, and at this very moment, someone is being tortured, killed. Unfortunately, we have countless examples like this. Let’s recall, for example, the recent horrific story of Marine Bogdan Usenko, whose remains—bearing signs of inhuman torture—were returned to his family. It shouldn’t be this way! It shouldn’t! But nothing is changing.
I’m not the first person to give an interview after being held captive. How many similar stories have there been already… It seems that no matter what you say, it won’t have any impact or result, because our people are still being held in Russian torture chambers that no one has access to.
The idea that international organizations like the Red Cross visit detention centers and monitor what’s happening there—that’s not true. If any inspections did take place, they were conducted by the Russians. On such days, they forced us to say that we were satisfied with all the conditions. “That’s all,” the Marine notes.
“I’m grateful to those caring people who constantly take to the streets and don’t let society forget about those who are in captivity. First and foremost, these are the families of the captives. But something needs to be done at the national and international levels. We need to speak out and demand that Russia return the Ukrainians. They must be set free,” emphasizes Ivan Nakonechny.
Author: Alina Logvinenko
“Russians are inhuman, sadists”—with these words, Marine Ivan Nakonechny begins his speech at the Ukrainian panel during the World Economic Forum in Davos. He is visibly nervous, trying to say as much as possible within the allotted time. But is it even possible to fit everything he has experienced, seen, and felt over the past few years into a few minutes?
Three years and five months—that is exactly how long Nakonechny, a soldier in the 1st Separate Battalion of the 36th Separate Marine Brigade and a defender of Mariupol, was held captive by the Russians. Ivan was released in a prisoner exchange on October 2, 2025. Hundreds of his brothers and sisters in arms remain captives of the occupiers to this day, enduring brutal torture, interrogations, and psychological torment every day.
Ivan spoke about this during a panel discussion in Davos dedicated to sharing experiences of Russian captivity. The international community must hear this harsh truth. It must be heard not only to express sympathy, but first and foremost to respond and fight for the liberation of our prisoners of war, who are being illegally held by Russia in inhumane conditions.
Next—Ivan Nakonechny’s story. About the defense of Mariupol, his captivity, the ordeals he endured, and the genocide of Ukrainians in Russian torture chambers.
A Decision That Changed His Life
In 2016, Ivan was graduating from a railway technical college in Mykolaiv; he was planning to find a job and, in general, live a normal life. One day, while discussing plans with a friend, he heard that his friend was planning to join the army, to which Ivan replied that he’d go anywhere but the army—he definitely didn’t want to join.
But shortly after that conversation, Nakonechny went to the military registration and enlistment office, passed a medical examination, and then underwent brief training at a training center. And just a few weeks later, he was standing before the command post of the 1st Separate Marine Battalion of the 36th Marine Brigade.
“It was a decision that even I still can’t explain to myself. I just decided—and that was it. I started my service in an airborne assault company as a regular rifleman. Then I became a senior rifleman-medic and a squad leader. And in 2019, a comrade suggested I transfer to the reconnaissance platoon, and I agreed,” Ivan says.
In reconnaissance, I served as a combat medic for some time, then took on the role of squad leader. And at the same time—since a scout must know and be able to do everything—he flew drones. Over the course of several years, he managed to complete seven training courses abroad.
Most of Ivan’s unit’s rotations took place in the Mariupol sector: Vodyane, Chermalyk, Maloyanisol. Since 2019—Pavlopil. In fact, it was there that Ivan encountered Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The First Days of the Full-Scale
Invasion The escalation in the Donbas began about a week before February 24. In the Mariupol sector, Russian forces stepped up their activity on the 21st. At 1:00 a.m. on February 25, Ivan was woken up with the words: “It’s started.”
“From that moment on, fighting raged. Tanks, ‘Grad’ rockets… I remember we sent two soldiers to the evacuation point. They were coming back, and right before my eyes, a Grad rocket fell in front of them, ricocheted, and flew off to the side. They just froze. It was like something out of a movie. On February 27, we retreated from the outskirts of Pavlopil to Orlovskoye, where we held our ground—but not for long. Heavy shelling began; we suffered our first casualties; it was difficult to hold our defenses in an open field. On top of that, our left flank was crumbling. On the morning of February 28, we were ordered to load up into the vehicles. We’d previously received information from unofficial sources that we were heading to Zaporizhzhia. “But I was so cold then—I hadn’t had time to grab any warm clothes because it was such chaos. I lay down in the back of the APC and fell asleep, trying to warm up,” Ivan recalls.
When he woke up, the vehicles were already approaching the drop-off point. Ivan looked around, taking in the familiar scenery. The destination turned out to be the Ilyich Iron and Steel Works in Mariupol.
The Defense of “Ilyich”
The scouts’ first tasks were to locate communications lines, alternate routes, approaches and escape routes, conduct ground and aerial reconnaissance, evacuate the wounded, and, of course, contain the enemy. They also attempted to penetrate behind enemy lines to gather intelligence on enemy movements.
The situation was complicated by the fact that the Russians had a significant advantage in manpower and virtually unlimited ammunition. The defenders of “Ilyich” could not boast of the same. The shortage of personnel was critical; artillerymen, cooks, and the band—anyone who could handle a weapon—were drawn into infantry combat.
We were almost out of ammunition.
“One day, aerial reconnaissance spotted a concentration of Russians—about a battalion’s worth, several hundred men. The battalion commander got so fired up, saying we had to take them out. We called in tanks; they drove up, fired a couple of shots, and missed… Well, we had nothing else to shoot with. The artillery couldn’t operate either due to a lack of mines and shells. It was the same story with small arms—when we ran out of 7.62-caliber rounds, we switched to the AKS and, accordingly, to 5.45-caliber rounds. Eventually, we started using tracer rounds. And even then, we followed the principle: if I can’t see it, I don’t shoot. We let the enemy get as close as possible to get a shot off. Our anti-tank troops did a tremendous amount of work back then; they’d run right up in front of Russian vehicles and take them out while they still had ammunition. And a great many of them died there.
“At Azovstal, helicopters dropped whatever aid they could. Nothing arrived at Ilyich,” says the Marine.
Ivan carried out his missions as part of groups defending the approaches to the plant. The guys tried to do everything in their power—even the impossible—to stop the enemy’s advance.
“However, when the Russians began forming columns just a few hundred meters away—when we saw them and couldn’t do anything because we had no weapons—it became clear that the situation was very dire. You know, now that more than three years have passed, it’s easy to speculate on what we should have done back then. But under those circumstances, we did everything we could.
When it comes to Mariupol, I want to point out that we shouldn’t single out any one unit. For a machine to work, all the parts have to be in place, right? The Marines, “Azov,” border guards, National Guard troops, the 56th Brigade, and other units of the Defense Forces—they were all in their places, and they all played an important role.”
The Breakout Attempt and Capture
According to Ivan, the first order to move from the MMK to “Azovstal” came on April 7. At 6:00 p.m., the order was given to pack up, but at 10:00 p.m., the mission was canceled for some reason. At that point, the distance between our defenders and the Russians at the Illich Steel Plant was minimal.
“We’d already grown close to one another. There had been a lot of fighting. Well, basically, we were calculating how much longer we could hold out and what we could do. It was clear that our days were numbered. We came up with several options, including a breakthrough to Azovstal and into territory controlled by Ukraine. I was leaning toward the second option. There’s occupied Mariupol, with ‘Azovstal’ and ‘Ilyich’ inside it. “What’s the point of moving from one ‘canned food can’—where we’re trapped—to essentially the same thing?” Ivan asks rhetorically.
The breakout was supposed to take place on the night of April 10–11, 2022.
“Everyone was briefed on the route plans and the contact information for the people who were supposed to meet us. The guides, the points where we were to disperse, the order in which the convoy would depart—all of this was organized and planned in detail. But almost immediately, everything ‘fell apart.’ In the evening, tracked vehicles entered the area, and a field hospital with the wounded was moved to our bunker. It’s 1:00 a.m.—there’s no order to depart. And the brigade commander isn’t there… But the convoy is—everyone’s gathered, standing, waiting. Can you imagine what it’s like to turn a convoy around?! Of course, the Russians caught on, scrambled their planes, deployed every weapon at their disposal, and rained down a barrage of fire on the convoy. There were a great many casualties… Those who could made it back to the “Ilyich.” The battalion commander tried to resolve the situation and organize our defenses, but it’s clear that once a position has been lost, it’s very difficult to regain it—and in our situation, it didn’t seem possible at all,” the soldier explains.
The following night, a second attempt was made to escape from the plant. The marines left in separate groups—some were breaking through toward “Azovstal,” while others, like Ivan and his comrades, were trying to escape from the occupied territory. However, they didn’t get very far. On April 16, 2022, the Russians took them prisoner.
Prisoners in Occupied Donetsk
Oblast “And so began my arduous journey,”—Ivan utters this brief preamble to his years of captivity with a certain irony. Its source, however, is not flippancy, but tremendous self-control.
Ivan’s group was taken to the occupied village of Nikolskoye in the Mariupol district, where the first interrogations took place. Then they were transferred to the Donetsk Organized Crime Control Department.
“That’s where the beatings began. They drove a knife into the shoulder of one of our comrades from the battalion. Some of the guys were as black as the earth and beaten like dogs. They didn’t feed us, and there was almost no water. I remember they took us to a hospital for a chest X-ray, lined us up against the wall, and some old woman said, ‘They should all be shot.’ And she was Ukrainian!” recalls Ivan.
The route of our transfers through occupied Donetsk Oblast varied: after the Donetsk Organized Crime Control Department, we were moved to Olenivka; from there, to the Donetsk pretrial detention center; then to Horlivka; and finally to Torez.
With each move, conditions grew worse—unsanitary conditions, poor food.
“In the Donetsk ‘SIZO,’ we spent 60 days in a cell without water. In Horlivka, the ‘intake’ was so brutal that I thought, if this happens every day, I simply won’t survive it. Sanitary conditions were a bit better there, because it was clearly one of the ‘model’ detention centers. We were allowed to visit the bathhouse once a week, and our laundry was washed. Prisoners whose relatives lived in the occupied territories of Donetsk Oblast could receive letters and packages. “It wasn’t just that we didn’t receive anything—for a long time, our families didn’t even know if we were alive,” says Ivan Nakonechny.
Siberia: In the Russian Hell
From Torez, Ivan Nakonechny, along with other prisoners of war, was transported to Russia—all the way to Siberia, to the Altai Krai, in the city of Biysk.
“There I realized: everything they did to me in the ‘DPR’ was child’s play. In Siberia, they destroyed us, reduced us to nothing,” he says.
Beatings, electric shocks, burns from soldering irons, being forced to wear a gas mask while having the air supply cut off—a practice the torturers called “playing elephant”—were daily “procedures.”
Every time you left the cell, it meant only one thing—you would be tortured in one of these ways.
You could only move through the corridors hunched over, with your eyes closed, and escorted by dogs. Hunger and cold were constant companions. The prisoners had no watches, but the daily routine was always the same, so they knew exactly what time it was.
“In the morning, we had calisthenics; we were required to sing the Russian national anthem, then breakfast—if you could call it that. Because usually, ‘food’ consisted of some water flavored with detergent. Then came the beatings. As terrible as it may sound, you got used to being beaten or seeing others beaten. From morning until night, someone was being tortured, and we constantly heard their screams, filled with pain and horror.
They beat us for speaking Ukrainian, for tattoos featuring national symbols or Marine Corps insignia. If they saw a Scandinavian tattoo, they’d call us “Nazis” and beat us again.
They stopped hitting us in the face when they started taking the guys away for prisoner exchanges, so the signs of torture wouldn’t be so obvious. But that doesn’t mean the torture stopped; instead, they started using electric shocks even more—they’d connect cords from “tapiks” to any part of the body. And they usually filmed everything on their phones. “Can you really call them normal people?” the Marine shares his horrific memories.
We were fed Russian propaganda daily: videos with distorted history, Russian news reports full of lies about the course of the war, and, of course, music—they hardly ever turned it off.
The Russian torturers tried to destroy the Ukrainian defenders not only physically; they crushed their will to resist, their human dignity, and their belief that anyone remembered them.
“Yes, we were angry… Because of everything we had to go through, everything we had to endure. We understood that our government had nothing to do with this, that Russia was holding us captive, but it was very difficult to cope with our own emotions and feelings of despair and helplessness. Why am I here, of all people? When will this all end—and will it ever end at all? What if they’ve really forgotten about us? All these questions were constantly on my mind. And the level of inner aggression was immense.
One day, after yet another brutal beating, they threw us into a cell. And there we were, lying there, looking at one another and realizing that through all of this, the Russians were trying to make us just like them—aggressive, intimidated, and numb. And we promised ourselves that we wouldn’t let that happen.
Yes, we couldn’t change reality, but we could still control our own attitude toward it. What did we do? We laughed it off. We talked a lot and supported one another. And we argued—that was inevitable. Because I’m from the Marine Corps, one guy was from “Azov,” and another from the National Guard, and whenever the conversation turned to the events in Mariupol, we had plenty to argue about. But even so, we always remained human,” says Ivan.
The world must act
Ivan was released in a prisoner exchange on October 2, 2025. The comrades with whom he shared a cell remain in captivity to this day. Just like thousands of other Ukrainian citizens.
“Here we are, sitting with you right now, talking, and at this very moment, someone is being tortured, killed. Unfortunately, we have countless examples like this. Let’s recall, for example, the recent horrific story of Marine Bogdan Usenko, whose remains—bearing signs of inhuman torture—were returned to his family. It shouldn’t be this way! It shouldn’t! But nothing is changing.
I’m not the first person to give an interview after being held captive. How many similar stories have there been already… It seems that no matter what you say, it won’t have any impact or result, because our people are still being held in Russian torture chambers that no one has access to.
The idea that international organizations like the Red Cross visit detention centers and monitor what’s happening there—that’s not true. If any inspections did take place, they were conducted by the Russians. On such days, they forced us to say that we were satisfied with all the conditions. “That’s all,” the Marine notes.
“I’m grateful to those caring people who constantly take to the streets and don’t let society forget about those who are in captivity. First and foremost, these are the families of the captives. But something needs to be done at the national and international levels. We need to speak out and demand that Russia return the Ukrainians. They must be set free,” emphasizes Ivan Nakonechny.
This is an automatic translation generated by DeepL.