Russian soldiers carved swastikas into the foreheads of two Ukrainian prisoners of war, leaving them struggling with severe psychological trauma, doctors told The Telegraph.
Serhiy doesn’t know what Russian soldiers used to mutilate him because his eyes were blindfolded with tape. He only knows that the act was carried out with extreme cruelty.
“I want your children to know that you’re fascist. That’s why I am cutting deep,” the soldier told him. “So it’s visible on your bones.”
Hot blood streamed down Serhiy’s face, but he was given nothing to clean himself or any medical care for his multiple injuries.
The act, a war crime, was likely inspired by Moscow’s claims that its war in Ukraine is a special “deNazification” operation.
Mobilised into the Ukrainian military not long after Russia invaded, Serhiy was captured after a fierce skirmish last December in the Donetsk region. His captors took him to a processing centre, where he was subjected to two weeks of torture. They kept him in a basement with no food, only taking him out to beat him unconscious.
The swastika runs from just below his hairline to almost his brow and was likely cut with a knife, his doctors believe.
Two Ukrainian soldiers are being treated for swastika-shaped torture scars
The patients have undergone laser treatment in an effort to reduce the scarring
Soon after, he was transferred to Chechnya, where he arrived almost naked and covered in layers of dried blood, and released five months later in a prisoner exchange. A year on from his capture, the psychological scars still run so deep that Serhiy finds it almost impossible to talk about what happened to him.
The physical marks left behind are harder to hide, however. He covers his face with a baseball cap and rarely removes it. The swastika mark weighs heavy on him psychologically – a symbol loaded with harmful meaning and social stigma.
“It reminds him every day of the torture he experienced,” said his wife, Olha.
“I don’t understand the logic in what they did because his children hate the Russians for what they’ve done,” said Olha. The couple, who are both 40 and from Vinnytsia, met at pre-school and have two teenage children together – they did not want to use their full names due to the sensitive nature of the injury. “They don’t think he’s a fascist, he’s a hero.”
Serhiy’s story is just one example of the heavy and diverse suffering inflicted by Russia’s brutal ongoing war. Ukraine does not publish military casualty figures, but the UN says at least 10,000 civilians have been killed and over 18,500 injured. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians also face the future with life-altering injuries from torture, explosions and active fighting.
In peacetime, a patient wounded in a road accident would likely receive medical help quickly and begin treatment within hours. However, emergency care for a civilian or soldier wounded as a result of fighting focuses only on saving their life, and it could be weeks before they receive recovery care.
If the skin is left to repair itself it usually leads to problematic atrophic and hypertrophic scarring. This can impact quality of life, affecting the skin’s functionality – removing, for example, a person’s ability to talk, eat or laugh – or self-confidence if it affects visible parts of the body, such as the face and hands. “When you lose a limb you have to learn to live without a part of yourself,” said Turkevych. “With scars, you have to learn to live with something new. It’s like a gift you didn’t ask for.”
These sorts of injuries can be a low priority for Ukraine’s stretched healthcare system. However, doctors at 30 clinics around Ukraine are pioneering new laser techniques to treat these kinds of healed scars as part of the Neopalymi project. They are hoping to start work on a specialised external recovery centre and publish their findings in a medical journal next year.
