Volodymyr Mykolayenko, the ex-Ukrainian mayor who spent three years in captivity after refusing to serve Russia, speaks of the beatings and starvation he faced
Marc Bennetts
October 26, 2025
The Times
When Volodymyr Mykolayenko, the former mayor of the Ukrainian city of Kherson, was abducted by the Kremlin’s forces a few weeks into Moscow’s full-scale invasion, they gave him a terrifying choice: collaborate or face a lifetime of hell in Russian captivity. “They offered me money and security. They told me to choose any position I wanted [with the Russian occupying powers],” he said. “They said that if I didn’t agree, I would die in prison.” He turned them down and his refusal to betray his homeland was punished with sadistic vengeance. For more than three years, Mykolayenko, 65, was locked up in dirty cells, beaten several times a day, and fed near-starvation rations until his release in a prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine in August. Gaunt, with haunted eyes, he said he still had nightmares about his long ordeal.
“I’m trying to erase these years from my life and forget them like a bad dream,” he said during an interview in the hospital in Kyiv where he has been undergoing treatment since his return from Russia. “It’s hard though, and I think I will need a long time to recover mentally.”
Mykolayenko’s descent into the darkest corners of Russia’s sprawling penal system began shortly after President Putin’s troops had seized Kherson, a once-bustling city in southern Ukraine.
On the morning of the invasion, Mykolayenko, a well-known local politician who was the city’s mayor from 2014 to 2020, enlisted in a territorial defence unit. After Kherson fell in March 2022, he was lured into a trap, thrown into a car boot and driven to a prison. He was locked up in a damp, cold cell and beaten for information about where Ukrainian resistance forces were storing their weapons, even though he was just a rank-and-file fighter. Eventually, he said, the Russians gave up and renewed their attempts to convince him to side with Moscow.
When he refused to buckle, they put him up against the wall, as if they were about to execute him. “I can’t say I wasn’t scared at all, but I told them that I have two grandchildren and they will continue my life for me. I surprised myself at that moment,” he said.
From Kherson, Mykolayenko was sent to Sevastopol, in occupied Crimea, and then to Russia’s Voronezh region, and finally to a penal colony in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow, where he spent the vast majority of his ordeal. His fellow prisoners included Ukrainian troops who were captured by Russia during the battle for Mariupol, the Ukrainian port city. “The beatings started on the very first day. They hit me and the other Ukrainian prisoners with batons, they punched us and they used electro-shockers on us,” he said. They were also beaten mercilessly for speaking even a word of Ukrainian.
Some of his torturers, he said, professed to be Russian Orthodox Christian believers. “They would turn on some [radio] programme about Christ in the morning and then in the evening half beat you to death,” he said. They were fed watery soup, boiled potato peels and given a slice of bread a day. For vitamins they picked and ate nettles that they discovered growing under the prison fence. His account of his treatment is in line with a report by the United Nations in September on Russia’s systematic torture of Ukrainian civilians. Thousands of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers remain in Russian custody, including Ihor Kolykhaiev, who succeeded Mykolayenko as Kherson’s mayor in 2020.
More than 90 per cent of those released by Russia have provided detailed accounts of torture. One soldier who was freed in a prisoner exchange had the words “Glory to Russia” carved on his stomach.
Despite the horrors of Russian captivity, Andriy Yermak, President Zelensky’s chief of staff, revealed on the day that Mykolayenko was released that the former mayor had turned down the chance of freedom in 2022 in favour of a young, critically ill prisoner. “When it came to choosing between me and the boy, I was always going to say to let him out first,” he told Ukrainian journalists after crossing the border to a hero’s welcome.
As the war raged, Mykolayenko was kept in an information vacuum, with no access to news, and was not allowed to receive letters from his family. He was able, however, to discover that Kherson had been liberated in November 2022 after a Russian investigator let slip that Moscow’s troops had been driven out. “I felt like I had been released from captivity myself,” he said.
Although Putin’s forces abandoned control of Kherson, they retreated only as far as the left bank of the Dnipro, the mighty river that cleaves the region. From there they bombard the city with artillery, while their drones target the few remaining civilians who dare to venture on to its shattered streets.
Like many people in Kherson, Mykolayenko suspects that the city’s defences were undermined by local collaborators who ensured that key bridges were not blown up to prevent Putin’s army from entering the city. “I hope these people are found and punished,” he said.
His release came on August 24, Ukrainian Independence Day, which was also the day before his mother’s 91st birthday. He had not been certain that she was alive. His wife, daughter, and grandchildren all remain in Kherson. His mother’s home has been destroyed by Russian attacks, however, and his own flat has been damaged. Yet he is determined to return home. “I’m not afraid to live in Kherson, but I’m afraid to see the city in ruins,” he said. “But I want to be useful. I’m not the youngest and maybe not the healthiest, but I want to help to rebuild the city and, if the need arises, I will be ready to defend it again. As soon as I get out of hospital, I’m going back to Kherson.”
Marc Bennetts has been covering Russia and the former Soviet Union, including Ukraine, for The Times and Sunday Times since 2015. He has reported from all across Russia, from Chechnya to deepest Siberia. He has also reported from Iran and North Korea. Marc is the author of two books: I’m Going to Ruin Their Lives, about Putin’s crackdown on the opposition, and Football Dynamo, about Russian football culture. He is now writing a thriller, set during the polar night in Russia’s far north.