Around lunchtime on 12 March, Oleh Baturin, a Ukrainian journalist in the occupied region of Kherson, received a phone call from an unknown number.
As he turned to go home, he heard a van door slam and the clatter of feet heading towards him.
Over the next eight days, he said, he was held captive with little water, food or medicine.
Speaking to the Observer, he described how he was interrogated, tortured, threatened with mutilation and death, and told that his family would suffer.
Hitting him below the knees and on the back with gun butts and kicks, they yelled: “What is your name?
Then he heard Tsygipa’s voice and realised that he, too, had been kidnapped and forced to call him by the Russians.
When he got home, he was glad to take a walk, breathe clean air, look at the Ukrainian flags and be reunited with his family. »
