Ukrainian civilian freed in prisoner swap tells of ‘constant cruelty’

Since his release from a Russian prison, Dmytro Khyliuk has barely been off the phone.

The Ukrainian journalist was detained by Russian forces in the first days of their full-scale invasion. Three and a half years later he’s been released in a prisoner swap, one of eight civilians freed in a surprise move.

While Russia and Ukraine have swapped military prisoners of war before, it is very rare for Russia to release Ukrainian civilians.

Dmytro has been catching up frantically on all he’s missed. But he’s also phoning the families of every Ukrainian he met in captivity: he memorised all their names and each detail.

He knows that for some, his call may be the first confirmation that their relative is alive.

There were celebrations here last month when Dmytro was returned from Russia in a group of 146 Ukrainians.

A crowd came out waving blue and yellow national flags, cheering as the buses carrying the freed men passed hooting their horns.

Most on board were soldiers with sunken cheeks, emaciated after their years behind bars.

Officials won’t say exactly how they got the eight Ukrainian civilians back in the same exchange, only that it involved sending back in return “people Russia was interested in”.

One source said those included residents of the Kursk region in Russia, evacuated when Ukrainian forces launched their 2024 incursion. The group’s exact status after that is unclear.

Stepping off the bus to a cheering crowd, Dmytro’s first phone call was to tell his mother he was free. Both his parents are elderly and unwell and his greatest fear had been never seeing them again.

“The hardest was not knowing when you’ll be allowed back. You could be freed the next day or stay prisoner for 10 years. Nobody knows how long it’s for.”

We met Dmytro shortly after his release as he recuperated at a Kyiv hospital.

The details he shared of his captivity are chilling.

“They grabbed us and literally dragged us to the prison and on the way they beat us with rubber batons shouting things like, ‘How many people have you killed?'” he said, describing his transfer to Russia.

He was held in multiple facilities and his account chimes with many others we’ve heard over the years.

“Sometimes they’d let the guard dog off its leash so that it could bite us. The cruelty was really shocking and it was constant.”

He tells me he was bitten and left bleeding. “I was so stressed I only felt the pain 20 minutes later.”

The journalist was never charged with any crime.

Physically the first year was the hardest. “We were starving. We were given very little food for a long time,” he remembers. He lost more than 20kg in the first few months, causing him dizzy spells. But the soldiers he was held with were treated far worse.

“They would call them for interrogation, and they were beaten and tortured with electric shock,” Dmytro remembers.

He heard their pain and saw the bruises.

The journalist’s family home is a world away from all that, in the pretty village of Kozarovychi just outside Kyiv.

It feels peaceful, apart from the air raids, with gardens full of poultry, blackberry bushes and fruit trees.

But the back wall of Dmytro’s house still has chunks torn out of it by shrapnel and the lawn was only just repaired where Russian troops had parked a tank.

In 2022, right at the start of their full-scale invasion when the Russians were advancing on Kyiv, they took over the village.

A few days later, as Dmytro and his father, Vasyl, tried to check the damage to their home, they were detained.

Russian troops forced both men to the ground, bound and blindfolded them, and marched them into captivity. The pair now know they were held in a basement beneath the local warehouses where the Russians had made their base.

The men were moved several times as the number of civilian detainees increased.

Vasyl was eventually set free but for many months he feared the worst for his son.

“I didn’t know where he’d been taken and I was scared,” the pensioner tells me. “There were gunshots at night. One man was taken outside, then a shot was fired. He didn’t come back. I still don’t know the fate of all the people who were there.”

Then he and his wife got a tiny scrap of paper from a Russian prison.

“I’m alive, I’m well. Everything’s ok,” Dmytro wrote to them both, in Ukrainian. They would receive just one more note in his entire time in captivity.

Other families have had no news at all.

Across Ukraine, officials say more than 16,000 civilians are currently missing. So far, they’ve only located a fraction of them in Russian prisons.

Moscow doesn’t publish lists because detaining civilians with no cause is illegal. But that makes getting them back extremely complicated.

Forty-three men are still being held from the area around Dmytro’s village alone.

They include Volodymyr Loburets, detained at the same time, held in the same basements and then moved to Russia. He now has a new grandson he’s never met and a family who miss him badly.

“It’s hard. It’s really hard. We smile, yes, and thank goodness, I have a new grandson,” Volodymyr’s wife Vera says, as baby Yaroslav gurgles beside her on a play mat. “But I had a husband – and now I don’t.”

“The government says it won’t swap our relatives for Russian soldiers, so we are left waiting for the fourth year running until there is some way to get them back.”

Vera is deeply frustrated. But so is Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman.

Dmytro Lubinets describes dealing with Russia as like playing chess: you stick to all the rules, only for your opponent to stand up, pull on boxing gloves and punch you.

The problem is, Ukraine can’t hit back. It has no pool of Russian civilian prisoners because it’s against the rules of war under the Geneva Convention. Sending Russian soldiers back in return for Ukrainian civilians would be a disaster.

“The very next day Russia would take thousands of civilians hostage in occupied areas, just to swap for its soldiers,” the ombudsman points out. “So Russia is capturing our civilians and there is no legal mechanism to return them.”

There has been one trade involving Ukrainian citizens detained and sentenced here for collaborating with the enemy: a group – said to be volunteers – was swapped for Ukrainian civilians held in Russia.

It’s not clear whether that has been repeated.

For Dmytro’s family, the long and painful wait is almost over. He’ll join them in the village as soon as the hospital declares him fit again.

His mother, Halyna, jokes that she has a long list of jobs for her only son – fixing all the damage done by the Russians.

In fact, she can barely mention his name without crying.

“I can’t control my emotions,” she tells me, in tears. “When Dima called, he told me to be calm. That he was back in Ukraine and I shouldn’t cry anymore. But we haven’t seen our son for three and a half years!”

Dmytro is taking it slowly though, because being back here requires some adjusting.

“I knew the war was still going on, but not that they were bombarding Kyiv with drones and that was unexpected and sad,” he says. “So the trees are the same, the buildings are the same. But you understand this is a different country. You’re in a different reality.”

Additional reporting by Mariana Matveichuk and Kristina Volk