A traumatised Ukrainian PoW has reportedly been left unable to speak or show emotion after he was electrocuted while being held in a hellhole gulag in Russia.
WHAT HAPPENED?
Yuri Hulchuk, 23, was electrocuted through his genitals by a notorious Russian torturer named Dr Evil after being captured in the war in 2022.
He faced regular beatings by guards, with stun guns used on his legs so often he became almost paralysed.
Even after his release from the gulag, he is so traumatised he barely responded to his mother, doctor Milana Kompaniiets, when he finally reunited with her after more than two years in Russian hands.
Footage shows the pair hugging, with Hulchuk’s mother telling him: ‘We love you, we really love you. Without you, we didn’t have a life. You are our sun, our joy, our pride, our love.’ But Hulchuk tragically didn’t respond due to the torture he suffered.
Kompaniiets had spent two years searching for evidence her linguist son was alive after he vanished in the April 2022 fall of the Illich steel plant in Mariupol.
Eventually, she found a photograph of PoWs in Russia where she recognised his changed face.
Then she found from exchanged prisoners that he was alive, but also heard about how he had been horrifically tortured.
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She personally met those freed in exchanges by Russia and eventually found a Ukrainian national guardsman who had shared a cell with her son in a harsh penal colony in Moldavia.
‘We talked every day for hours. I learned things that I, as a mother, shouldn’t have known,’ she said.
Her son was beaten relentlessly until he could no longer speak, according to the Media Initiative for Human Rights in Ukraine.
‘I think [he suffered] a stroke from the beating,’ she said. ‘My son spoke English, Chinese, and Polish fluently and was very talkative, and after all that, not being able to speak…’
