LEOPOLI – Welcome to the territories occupied by the Russians. For eight long days, the journalist Oleh Baturyn was kidnapped, beaten, brutally interrogated and threatened with death by Putin’s soldiers. “In all that time,” he tells him to Republic, “they rarely gave me food or drink, I slept on a rock-hard cot, it was bitterly cold and I could never wash myself.” Since he was released on March 20, Baturyn has returned home to Kakhovka, in the southeast of the country, in the occupied region around Kherson.
That’s where we reached him on the phone. And he’s still not safe: the reporter of Novyi Den he risks being targeted by the Russians again if he speaks. But for him it is more important that the rest of the world know what the Putin regime is doing with journalists, even in the newly conquered cities and villages of Ukraine.
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According to official data from the “Institute of Mass Information”, six journalists in Ukraine have been kidnapped, eleven those threatened with death, five reporters killed during the fighting, and seven others were injured since the beginning of the conflict. seventy media had to close their doors because they ended up under the heel of the regime. In all, 148 crimes have been committed against journalists from February 24 to today, according to official data. And Oleh defines the situation in the occupied area where he was kidnapped. not far from Kherkov, “a nightmare. And not so much for me, but for the whole Ukrainian population “.
In the days immediately preceding his kidnapping, which took place on March 12, Oleh Baturyn was already in the throes of anxiety. In Kakhovka, in his city occupied by the Russians since the first days of the conflict, there were rumors that the military were on the hunt for journalists: “They used to call house to house to find reporters and activists”. And on March 8, when Serhij, a well-known blogger, had begged him on Facebook not to track him down, not to call him and to wait for him to look for him, Oleh became suspicious. Three days later, Serhij had phoned him, “but I felt his voice was too calm, his tone too flat.” Serhij asked him to see him the next day, Oleh accepted. But the reporter went to the appointment alerting family and friends that he would meet Serhij at the Kakhovka bus station at five in the afternoon and that something was wrong. For safety, the reporter left his documents and mobile phone at home.
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“As soon as I got there I realized that in that large parking lot there was no way to escape. And I immediately noticed a strange minivan with Ukrainian registration. Shortly after five men got out of the minivan and ran towards me screaming ‘son of a bitch’ . They caught up with me and began to beat me savagely. They threw me to the ground, crushed my face on the asphalt and continued to punch and kick me. After a while they asked me where I had my cell phone and documents and started beating me again, maddened than not. had them with me “. The kidnappers put a sack on his head and took him to a secret location.
“When the minivan stopped, they tied my arms behind my back and made me get out.” Shortly after, without ever removing the sack from his head, other men began to question him in a room, never stopping to slap him. “They wanted to know the names of the journalists, the pro-Ukrainian activists, the places where we met, the real identities behind some telegram addresses, the addresses”. Oleh didn’t say a word, but peering under the sack they had stuffed on his head, he could see that some were wearing military uniforms. And he also heard screams from other rooms and the sound of shots fired from a gun. For hours they did not even allow him to go to the bathroom. At night they took him to another room and handcuffed him to a radiator.
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The next day they started asking him for names again, threatening to exterminate his family, to shoot him. But then they moved him elsewhere, locked him in a cell, in solitary confinement. “They gave me 350 grams of a disgusting mush once or twice a day.” The interrogations thinned out and were no longer accompanied by physical violence. “Every so often they entered the cell and asked me something, the pressure became psychological, the cell was squalid and no one told me anything about my fate”. On the eighth day, without any explanation, they released him.
Two weeks after that experience, for Oleh it is clear that “the Russians kidnap journalists to terrorize them, to force them to act as informers – they have offered me several times to collaborate with them – to bow their heads to the occupier. But as far as I’m concerned, that’s never going to happen. “