Putin’s Prisoner by Aiden Aslin & John Sweeney

Author:Aiden Aslin & John Sweeney [Aslin, Aiden & Sweeney, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529916898
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2023-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Hotel California

The Russians behaved correctly, more or less, but as soon as we were handed over to the Ukrainian quislings in the Donetsk People’s Republic – the DPR – then the horrors started. After the soldier I nicknamed ‘Sergeant Blue’ realized from my passport that I was British and socked me in the face, then he really started to lay into me, jabs to my face and body, before a senior officer shouted at him to cut it out.

The beating stopped but Blue remained on a mission to give me a horrible time. He ripped off the yellow and blue Ukrainian flag patches velcroed to my uniform and placed them on top of my head, so I looked like some kind of dunce. Then he pushed me around, calling me a ‘pede’ – faggot in Russian – and ordered me to get down on my knees while at the same time he picked up his rifle. He was playing at mock executions, which is a fun game if you like that sort of thing. I didn’t and still don’t. For my own amusement, some of the time I pretended not to understand his Russian, but I certainly got the gist.

All the really bad stuff that happened to me was done by the quislings from the DPR, but the Russians were there too, controlling their puppets, taking down details, stepping out from the shadows now and then to log who had been captured and what they might know and not know. The Russians knew what was going on.

On Day Two of my arrest I was taken out of the warehouse. It was always scary when you were singled out, leaving the safety of the mass of fellow prisoners behind. On the other hand, any relief from the headbanging torture – having to rest your head against a wall for eleven hours, with your hands held behind your back or else – was a blessing. Outside the warehouse, I was taken to a Russian Tiger armoured car, one of the fanciest military vehicles they’ve got. It was not old Soviet rubbish but a machine made by a Russian-Chinese joint venture. In it were four officers. They never said so but I was pretty sure these Russian soldiers were, in fact, FSB – the new name for the KGB, the secret police. Although they were wearing Russian army uniform, they were in the Tiger and the rest of their kit was really top-notch: American-manufactured body armour, tablets, the kind of laptops not carried around by grunts. And their questions were smart: again, not your average Russian grunts.

A word about the FSB. Secret policemen have been a power in the land in Russia for centuries, but their clammy grip on Russia’s soul strengthened with the October Revolution in 1917. The Bolshevik bloc of the Communist Party had fewer numbers than the Mensheviks, so in order to hold on to power, the knout, the cosh, and nine grams of lead in the back of the head stood in for the quaint ballot boxes and soapboxes we use in the West.

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