Warning: The article contains descriptions of violence that may shock sensitive people

Nikita Gorban sits cross-legged on an old steel hospital bed and runs his fingers over the bandage on his leg, where his toes used to be.

He is still wearing the clothes in which the Russians sent him home – a khaki T-shirt and sweatpants. He is pale, thin and looks much older than his 31 years.

“I’m very thin,” he says, looking down. “I look bad.”

He changes position on the bed. It’s been about two weeks since he was able to stand, and he has to move his legs regularly to keep from hurting.

It is a bright spring day in Zaporizhia, but the Russians are bombing the region, so the windows in the hospital are darkened. The air in the ward is hot and musty.

Nikita was returned to Ukraine only three days ago as part of a prisoner exchange and taken to this hospital with another man. They spent three gloomy weeks in prison in Russia. Another man, 28-year-old Serhiy Vasylyha, returned with both legs amputated.

“I was luckier than him,” says Nikita.

Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk is negotiating the exchange of prisoners.

“Severely injured people were amputated at this exchange – amputated limbs, sepsis and other serious injuries,” Vereshchuk said.

“There were obvious signs of torture,” she added. “The stories they told us are horrible.”

Nikita’s trials began in early March when the Russian army entered Andriyivka, a small village west of Kyiv. Nikita, a laboratory assistant at a Kyiv hospital, was hiding in a cold, damp cellar with his mother, her husband Sasha, his wife and five-year-old son. Sasha was Nikita’s stepfather, but they have long considered each other father and son.

The Russians went from house to house, pulled two men out of the basement and beat them, Nikita said.

“There was a shooting, people were being killed in the village, it was horrible,” he said.

They were blindfolded and taken to a field where they were tortured. Nikita has a fresh scar on his ankle – according to him, it remained after the Russians tightened the wrench around the ankle and turned it until the skin cracked. He heard other people around him, but did not know how many there were.

“All I remember is thinking, where is my father? And if he’s not with me anymore,” he says.

The Russians took their boots, filled them with water and put them on again. Then the prisoners were forced to lie face down on the ground in the cold. “We lay like that for three or four nights, in the rain, and we froze more and more,” says Nikita.

When he no longer heard the Russians nearby, Nikita quietly asked, “Dad, are you here?” And Sasha’s voice answered softly. They were together. From then on, they continued to talk when it seemed safe, assuring each other that they were close.

As they lay in the field, Nikita’s legs froze. Soon he could not feel them at all. Then shells began to fall close to them, announcing a loud bang.

“We lay on the ground for a long time, saying goodbye to life again and again,” says Nikita.

Eventually, they were lifted off the ground onto trucks. Blindfolded, Nikita tried to estimate how much time had passed. At one point, they were reunited with another group of prisoners and loaded onto helicopters. The famine began – since they were taken away, they have been given only one bowl of porridge, a piece of bread and cookies, Nikita said.

From helicopters they were transferred to the plane. Nikita felt the engines spin and the plane rush down the runway and take off. He assumed he was with 10 or 12 other prisoners.

“All right?” he said aloud, to the sound of engines.

“Yes, I’m fine,” Sasha replied.

In the village, Nikita and Sasha’s wives, Nadezhda and Svetlana, and Nikita’s son Artem moved from their basement to a larger shelter under a neighbor’s house. They did not know where their husbands were.

After a few houses, Sasha’s parents Nadezhda and Vladimir began to worry. Sasha stopped answering their calls, but it was impossible to leave the house to find out if he was safe. Shells fell around the village, and during breaks in shelling, Russian soldiers looted houses. For more than a month during the occupation, no family knew whether any of their relatives lived.

At one point, Nikita and Sasha crossed the airspace of Russia, and the cargo plane began to descend. They were taken to the camp, where they were blindfolded and saw each other. They hugged. Nikita said that the Russians also tortured Sasha with a wrench, but worse, and one of his fingers hung on a piece of muscle and skin. He was taken to a field hospital for treatment.

Taking off the bandage, Nikita finally saw his legs. His toes turned black. He knew that he had a severe cold from the cold, and sought medical help. The toes were dried and bandaged at the field hospital, but nothing more was done. He was stripped of his boots again, and after five days in the camp, he was transported by truck to SIZO № 1, a prison in the Russian city of Kursk.

The new prisoners were dressed in uniforms, their hair cut and told they were being “vaccinated” – as it turned out, it was a euphemism for beating, says Nikita. When he and Sasha were locked in a cell with 10 others, Nikita became increasingly convinced that he could lose both legs.

That first night, I realized that I could neither feel nor control my legs at all, he recalled. “And they started to stink.”

Other prisoners had the same depressing situation. Some later lost entire limbs. Prison care was minimal – vaccination with antibiotics and changing the bandage every three days. According to Nikita, the prison doctor told him: “We have medicine. Good medicine. But it is not for you.”

Prisoners entertained each other in the cell, recalling their families and telling jokes. They were forced to memorize patriotic Russian songs and perform them for the Guards, – said Nikita.

“Russia’s anthem, another disgusting song glorifying Putin, ‘Uncle Vova, we’re with you.’

According to him, they were interrogated two or three times a day and beaten. They were later forced to sign documents stating that they had been treated well, fed and not harmed – so they found out where they were, as the documents bore the stamp “Kursk SIZO 1”.

After three weeks in prison, Nikita’s legs deteriorated, and he and two others were finally taken to hospital. The surgeon told him that all his toes were amputated.

“They were in such a bad condition at the time that my toe just fell off during the examination,” he said.

He spent a week in hospital after the operation before an official there told him that he and several other seriously injured men would be sent home to support their families.

Iryna Vereshchuk told the BBC that the Russians were trying to exchange civilian hostages for Russian prisoners of war in Ukraine – a step prohibited by the Geneva Convention.

“That’s why they took all these hostages – civilians, women, local council workers – to try to use them,” she said.

“We know that there are more than a thousand hostages – including almost 500 women. We know that they are in prisons and pre-trial detention centers in Kursk, Bryansk, Ryazan, Rostov,” the deputy prime minister added.

Nikita was never taken to the Kursk prison, where he last saw Sasha. From the hospital he was again taken by plane, this time to Simferopol in the Crimea. Russian authorities told Vereshchuk that they did not have free ambulances, so the seriously injured were taken in exchange for five hours on cargo platforms.

At the meeting point, the Russians laid the wounded on a stretcher on a stretcher and left, while Ukrainian soldiers approached and took them away. Nikita still did not believe that he was in Ukraine – until one of the soldiers looked him in the eye and said in Ukrainian: “Come back, friend.”

“I fell to pieces,” he said. “I realized I had returned home.”

But he did not know if his family was alive. He knew nothing about what had happened in Ukraine over the past month. Nikita gave the Ukrainian official the number of Nadezhda’s wife and waited, his heart pounding.

“I was just waiting for the beeps to know at least that her phone was working,” he said. “Then the beeps started, and she dropped the call, and I knew she was alive.”

On the second attempt, Nadezhda answered. She told him that she and Artem were in Belgium and that they were safe.

“For five minutes we just cried into the phone,” says Nikita. “We tried to talk to each other, but we couldn’t. There were tears on my cheeks. I just heard her say hello and couldn’t breathe.”

Nadezhda called Sasha’s brother Vyacheslav and his parents Nadezhda and Vladimir to tell them the news.

“We now know that Sasha was alive when Nikita left, but that was two weeks ago,” his mother Nadezhda told me. “So we are still waiting and hoping. We are not doing well yet.”

After returning to Ukraine, Mykita tried to arrange a transfer from Zaporizhia to the Kyiv hospital where he worked. The process slowed down. Suddenly, on Tuesday morning, a nurse came to him and told him he was going home.

After a long journey in an ambulance, Nikita was taken to a hospital in Kyiv, where he was greeted as a hero. He was taken to a separate room with a large open window overlooking the pines. On Wednesday morning, he was visited by the head of the medical department and the chief surgeon. They anxiously awaited the news of Nikita, and both cried when he returned. Two other colleagues, a married couple, recently died with their children from a Russian shell.

“His return means so much to us,” said surgeon Yuri Shilenko. “He will have to learn to walk again, but we will do everything for him.”

Nikita put on his slippers and showed success – he got up and took a few steps. Doctors discussed his recovery plans. But he didn’t listen much.

“I only have one thing on my mind,” he said as they left. “Go to your wife and son.”

The material was prepared with the participation of Anna Pantyukhova

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