US president Donald Trump claims the Kremlin is now ready to end its invasion of Ukraine, but Ukrainians who have seen the Russian regime from inside say they witnessed only a lust for more war and conquest during years of imprisonment and torture.
Soldiers Serhiy Taraniuk and Ruslan Zarianych were captured at the same time while defending the southeastern Ukrainian port of Mariupol, and released on the same day in a prisoner exchange in 2024 after spending 2½ years in often brutal captivity.
In jails in occupied parts of Ukraine and in Russia itself, they were subjected to beatings, electric shocks, attacks by guard dogs and other physical and psychological abuse that rights groups say is standard treatment for Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs).
They also describe being exposed to an extreme version of the world view and propaganda pumped out across Russia by officials and media loyal to veteran autocrat Vladimir Putin, which combines reverence for the tsarist and Soviet empires with aggressive militarism, Orthodox conservatism and relentless demonisation of the West.
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“It won’t stop with Ukraine. They’re already threatening Finland, Estonia, Latvia and other countries,” says Zarianych (27), listing states bordering Russia that have stepped up security after recent suspected Russian drone activity over several EU and Nato members.
“The story keeps repeating itself,” says Taraniuk (31), who is from Crimea on the Black Sea, which Putin’s troops occupied in 2014. “They want to go further and further, as they did under the tsars. There are still so many places in Russia that don’t even have electricity or running water, yet they want to take more and more land.”
Trump has not explained why he thinks Putin is now ready to end Europe’s biggest war since 1945, after making the claim last Friday in a White House meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
After those talks, he urged Russian and Ukrainian forces to stop fighting and go home, leaving the current front line as the de facto border between the warring neighbours. Moscow has repeatedly rejected calls for an immediate ceasefire, however.
The full-scale invasion of Ukraine launched in February 2022 was the culmination of more than two decades in power that Putin used to jail or exile influential critics, crush independent media and political opposition, and restore a paralysing fear of the security services and official reverence for the Russian and Soviet empires.
“In one jail, from six in the morning until 10 at night, they’d put on a radio station that only talked about the Russian empire. The guards played Katyusha and other Soviet songs. One day they asked me about Stalin, and when I said I didn’t know much about him they laughed and then they beat me,” says Taraniuk.
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“They made us learn the Russian national anthem ... and of course only Russian was allowed. If they heard any prisoners speaking Ukrainian they would get a beating.”
Zarianych says he used to wonder whether reports about the cruelty and strangeness of Russian prisons might be exaggerated.
“But they weren’t,” he says now, as he and Taraniuk attend a mental health rehabilitation course in a medical facility called Unbroken in the western city of Lviv.
“For 2 ½ years we had to listen to propaganda about Stalin and Lenin, about how Lenin built Ukraine. The guards listen to Soviet music or modern remixes of Soviet songs. They live in their own ‘red’ 20th century,” he says.
“Russians live in a world of their own and are becoming more and more isolated ... It’s becoming something like North Korea. When you spend a lot of time inside that system, you start wondering whether what they say might be true.”
While opposition to the Kremlin regime and criticism of the war is now effectively banned in Russia, state violence against Ukraine and individuals is free of censure – last month, Putin signed a law withdrawing his country from the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture, which its parliament had ratified in 1998.
In a report last month on Russia’s treatment of Ukrainians, the United Nations human rights office said that “torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment ... including sexual violence, have been applied in a systematic and widespread manner against civilians in places of detention.” In 2024 the UN reported that 95 per cent of freed Ukrainian POWs said they had suffered torture.
Zarianych and Taraniuk are now recovering from their ordeal and planning their futures in civilian life. They are under no illusions about Ukraine’s chances of reclaiming occupied territory, or how hard it would be to reintegrate people who have lived – in some areas for more than a decade – immersed in toxic Russian propaganda.
“I dream of going back to Crimea but I realise it’s not possible now to get these places back militarily. Maybe in the future through diplomacy,” says Taraniuk.
“So many people in occupied territory have been brainwashed,” says Zarianych. “It’s like a partly rotten apple – if it’s reintegrated it could infect other parts of the country. So maybe we should look at this idea of freezing the front line where it is today.”
