“I was dripping, rotten flesh”

Despite the rapidly deteriorating situation in the steel industry, the 29-year-old reports that morale among Ukrainians was good. They would have expected and prepared for some decisive battle.

On May 15, Shyvoronok was wounded when an anti-tank missile hit him, and was taken half-dead to the “medicine bunker”. His leg was amputated the next morning. He remained conscious for only a few seconds before being ejected from the Azov Steelworks. He remembers Russian soldiers wearing the “Z” symbol, the Ukrainian says.

Because of his serious injuries, he was spared detention at the notorious Olenivka detention center, where dozens of Ukrainian prisoners were reportedly killed in an explosion last month. Instead, Shyvoronok was taken to a hospital in the Donetsk region, where a different form of illness awaited him.

“No contact with relatives, no access to the phone,” he says. Medical care was “very inferior” and medicines were in short supply. “I was a dripping, rotting piece of meat,” the soldier recalled. From the fifth day he received only antibiotics. He and three other soldiers at his station were given only enough food “to keep their hearts from stopping.”

His month and a half in captivity ended without warning. “We woke up at four in the morning, the lists were read, we were taken outside, put on buses and driven until the evening,” says Shyvoronok. He and about a hundred other wounded Ukrainian prisoners managed to leave the hospital as part of a prisoner exchange.

Shyvoronok tries to play down his serious injuries with humor: “I gave our doctors a lot of work.” As a career soldier, the 29-year-old says he continues to carry out some military duties despite his injuries, speaking in a very calm tone about his fate. Only once did his voice falter as he spoke of the thousands of Ukrainians still in Russian captivity. “It doesn’t give me peace of mind. It pushes from within. I can still breathe freely when the boys come back.”