Anastasiia Savova, the 24-year-old founder of an advocacy group for imprisoned marines, is still holding out hope for her father, who was captured at Mariupol
Anthony Loyd
January 17, 2025
The Times
The last time Oleksandr Savov spoke to his daughter he was under siege as he defended the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol The vista around the Ukrainian marine was one of twisted metal, screeching shells and flaming buildings, and the streets were filled with the dead and rubble. Nevertheless, like any good father, he played on the positives. “Dad told me that the weather was nice, that Mariupol was a good recreational city, and that he was among friends,” his daughter Anastasiia recalled, smiling briefly. “He told me not to worry, that everything would be ok.”
Just three weeks after that phone call, Savov, a soldier in Ukraine’s 36th Separate Marine Brigade, smashed his mobile phone, put down his assault rifle and surrendered with 2,500 other troops. It was May 17, 2022.
The 45-year-old was once a fit marine. Yet now, after more than two years in captivity and as Russia’s treatment of prisoners of war worsens, Savov is a ravaged man. When he was seen by another prisoner of war in a Russian prison in Kursk last August he was in a single cell with chronic tuberculosis and had a heart condition, brought on by malnutrition. Dramatically underweight, his legs were suppurating, infected as result of injuries received during torture. His suffering haunts Anastasiia, Oleksandr’s only child, daily. The two are close. Her father had been a single parent, who had raised his daughter alone since Anastasiia was five years old. “I know my dad has been tortured,” said Anastasiia in Kyiv this week. Now 24, and the co-founder of an advocacy group for imprisoned marines, Marine Corps Strength, she is irregularly updated on her father’s whereabouts by PoWs who are released in exchanges. “I know that dad has been electrocuted, beaten, and at times starved,” she added. “There are worse things I don’t know about. I try not to think about the times we shared in my childhood. I try not to think about his condition and wounds now. I focus on thinking about how he might be released. At night I pray that my dad will be saved.”
Dead or alive
Under the terms of the Third Geneva Convention, Oleksandr Savov and the thousands of other Ukrainian prisoners of war (PoWs) held by Russia are entitled to receive humane treatment including medical care, protection from harm, mail from their families and visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Yet few Ukrainian PoWs receive either protection or privilege.
Instead, Russia is weaponising the treatment of Ukrainian PoWs to exert maximum psychological stress on Ukraine’s national mood as the country nears its fourth year of war. The defenders of the Azovstal steel plant, once symbols of the country’s defiance in the face of invasion, are among the worst treated.
A December report by the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine confirmed the deteriorating situation for prisoners, detailing the “widespread and systematic” torture of Ukrainian PoWs, including beatings, electrocution, rape, prolonged solitary confinement, as well as a sharp increase in the number of incidents involving the killing of detainees.
A deliberate obfuscation of their true numbers adds to the plight of the PoWs. Despite having good access to Russian PoWs held by the Ukrainians, the ICRC receives only partial access to Ukrainian PoWs held by the Russians. As a result, no precise figure on the number of Ukrainian PoWs exists, though officials talk privately of the detention of over 7,500.
The number may be much higher. Ukraine’s commission for Persons Missing in Special Circumstances, which collates the number of missing soldiers and civilians, has an updated list of 51,000 Ukrainians missing since the start of the full-scale invasion. Most of those on the list are military personnel and though many are dead, others are held as undeclared prisoners.
From time to time these missing men come to light during prisoner exchanges. Since the beginning of the invasion, Ukraine and Russia have conducted 59 such exchanges, in which over 3,500 Ukrainians have been freed. The appearance of unknown PoWs is a regular occurrence. During one exchange in January last year 230 Ukrainian captives, including 48 missing Ukrainian soldiers, whose PoW status had never previously been acknowledged by Russia, were freed.
“In almost every PoW exchange some prisoners of war appear who were only ever declared missing in action, who never appeared on a prisoner list,” explained Olena Belyachkova, a lawyer with the Ukrainian investigative group Media Initiative for Human Rights. “I also know of at least four cases when Ukrainian soldiers the Russians said were dead, appeared alive in prisoner exchanges.”
Missing in action
Conversely, some Ukrainian soldiers confirmed as alive and PoWs, have later turned up as corpses in exchanges of the dead, having died or been killed in captivity. At least 170 bodies of Ukrainian PoWs who have lost their lives in captivity have been returned since 2022.
In the Kyiv offices of the missing persons commission on Thursday, just a few hundred yards from where Sir Keir Starmer walked the city’s cobbled streets, volunteers using AI facial recognition software examined footage of dead or recently captured Ukrainian soldiers on Russian Telegram channels, trying to identify the men on the list of the missing.
The investigators’ software trawled through archive social media posts as part of the identification process, so that photographs of smiling men in civilian clothes, at weddings, at parties or with their children, were suddenly matched with video clips of beaten and dazed
prisoners in filthy uniforms, or wounded Ukrainian troops being shot dead as they lay on the ground. “The Russians’ treatment of our troops is getting worse and worse,” said one of the investigators, known only as Oleh, after examining a clip on Telegram. It showed a dead Ukrainian soldier being eaten by a pig.
The ‘crime’ of combat
Hundreds of Ukrainian troops held prisoner by the Russians have been put on trial for alleged war crimes, and given criminal sentences. There is concern in Ukraine that this might affect their status when the war eventually ends. Though the Geneva Conventions stipulate a full release of PoWs after a conflict’s conclusion, the situation may be different for PoWs convicted of a crime by Russian courts.
“There is a risk that when the war is over, Russia may claim that it was not ‘a war’, but a ‘special military operation’, and that the prisoners of war are criminals,” said the head of the missing persons commission, Artur Dobroserdov. “It is impossible to know what Russia will do next, just as it is impossible to predict the actions of a rabid bear.”
Azovstal defenders are most likely to find themselves put to criminal trial, usually after false confessions extracted by torture. Recently, Ukrainian troops captured in the Kursk region have also been prosecuted. This week a Moscow court sentenced seven Ukrainian soldiers to fifteen years each for participation in the Kursk incursion.
Captured artillery crews are a favourite of prosecutors. In December 2023, Svitlana Lohosha learned that her 24 year-old son Vadim, who served as part of an Azov Regiment howitzer crew defending Mariupol, had been sentenced to 24 years in prison by a separatist court in Donetsk for “destroying civilian infrastructure and killing civilians”. “It is easy for the Russians to blame Ukrainian artillerymen like my son for the destruction the Russians caused when they attacked Mariupol,” said Lohosha, 51. “It’s a convenience, a way to shift blame.”
After sentencing, her son was transferred to a regular prison in Makiivka, northeast of Donetsk. Here, two of the prison’s six blocks were entirely devoted to incarcerating hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers sentenced to lengthy jail terms for alleged “war crimes”.
‘I could stand it psychologically but not physically’
One of the soldiers in the prison, Dmytro Kanupier, 25, an Azovstal defender, was released last October, despite being given a 29-year sentence for supposedly killing civilians during the battle of Mariupol. Kanupier gave a detailed account of how the Russians had forced a confession upon him while he was held for 350 days in Taganrog prison in Russia, a site infamous for its torture of Ukrainian PoWs. “They gave me fifteen sessions of electric-shock torture,” he said. “Three of those sessions lasted over a twelve hour period.”
In those sessions interrogators used electric stun guns, or cables plugged straight to the mains, and sometimes a wind-up generator, to electrocute the PoW. They electrocuted his fingers, thighs, arms, tongue and genitals. “In the end, I could stand it psychologically but not physically,” said Kanupier. “So I signed false confessions to two cases for the murder of
civilians, but I made them work for it.” Ironically, the Azov soldier said his treatment improved dramatically once he was given a criminal sentence and was sent to Makiivka along with other convicted PoWs. “We often wondered whether or not we’d ever get released once we’d been sentenced,” Kanupier reflected. “Then we figured that at least treatment as a convicted prisoner is better than as a prisoner of war, and that someday we’d get out, even if it took years. Anything was better than daily beatings and torture.”
Hope dies last
Amid Russia’s exploitation of its Ukrainian PoWs, slithers of hope still endure. Anastasiia no longer knows which Russian prison holds her father since he was transferred to an unknown destination five months ago. The ICRC have never managed to access Oleksandr or confirm his whereabouts. She has never received a letter from her father, and she doubts that her weekly letters ever reach him. Nevertheless, she regularly attends exchanges of PoWs, in the hope that by some incredible chance she might see Oleksandr among those released. Most recently, she was present at a December 30 prisoner exchange at which 189 Ukrainian prisoners were freed. “The last message Dad got out via another prisoner was that he loved me very much, and was hoping one day for an exchange,” she said.
“So I keep turning up to the exchanges, as I never know whether my dad will be among those who get out. I try not to be disappointed when I don’t see him there. Instead, I try to share the joy of others when I see them reunited, and imagine one day it’ll be my dad who makes it home.”
Anthony Loyd has been writing for the Times for over thirty years. He began his career reporting from the Bosnian war in 1993 and has since worked in multiple conflicts, including those in Ukraine, Chechnya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Libya, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic. His special reports have included eye-witness dispatches from the siege of Sarajevo, the genocide in Srebrenica, the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, the defeat of Islamic State in Mosul, Muammar Gaddafi’s downfall in Libya, and the withdrawal of the US-led coalition from Afghanistan in 2021. Anthony exposed the use of Sarin gas by the Assad regime in Syria in 2013, and later discovered and interviewed Shamima Begum in 2019. His Times multimedia projects have included the short film ‘Another Man’s War’ from Ukraine, and the highly acclaimed podcast series ‘Last Man Standing’. Among his many awards for The Times the reporter has won foreign correspondent of the year five times in the British Press Awards , and twice won the prestigious Prix Bayeux-Calvados for war correspondents. William Hague, Lord Hague of Richmond, was a Conservative MP for 26 years until he stepped down in 2015. He served as leader of the opposition from 1997-2001, and as first secretary of state and foreign secretary from 2010-14. He has written two significant biographies, winning history book of the year at the National Book Awards in 2005, and started writing columns for The Times in April 2021.