For a month the two men could not tell their psychologist what had happened to them, only that it was horrible beyond words. “If there’s hell somewhere, it’s worse than that,” said one.
The Ukrainian soldiers, aged 25 and 28, had been in Russian captivity — one for one month, the other for three.
After their return in a prisoner swap they had been referred to Anzhelika Yatsenko, 41, a psychologist in Poltava who deals with troubled young men. They were suicidal. The younger one had tried to kill himself. “I knew from previous cases they had probably been tortured,” she said. “As someone who gets referred the hardest cases, mostly men under 35, it’s very hard to surprise me.”
When they finally told her, it was, she said, “the first time I behaved not like a professional psychologist”.
“I’d never heard anything so horrible. I told them I needed the bathroom and went and cried and cried. I didn’t want them to see as they might think there’s no hope.”
The two men had been savagely beaten. Then the drunken Russians castrated them with a knife.
“One of them told me, ‘I don’t know how I am still alive, there was so much blood, I thought I’d die of blood poisoning’,” she said.
“Their dignity has been damaged so badly and it’s impossible to forget. The Russians told them, ‘We are doing this so you can’t have kids.’ To me this is genocide.”
There have been many reports of Ukrainians insisting on returning to battle even after losing arms and legs.
Astonishingly, among those fighting is the older of the two castrated men whom Yatsenko has been counselling. “He insisted on rejoining,” she said shaking her head. “He says he’s needed and it’s easier being in a place where there are no women. I guess, given what happened, he wants to kill Russians.”
She has another fear, however. “He may feel his life is worth nothing and just wants to die.”
Yatsenko believes her patients are not the only ones to have been castrated. “They told me the Russians performed the castration procedure very skilfully, as if they knew how to do it. And I’ve heard about a lot of cases from colleagues treating others.”
Last July a sickening video emerged, posted on pro-Russian Telegram channels, that appeared to show a Russian soldier castrating a Ukrainian prisoner. The soldier, wearing the distinctive Russian Z patch, is wearing blue surgical gloves and holding a green box-cutter knife as he reaches down on a prisoner lying face down with his hands tied, his mouth gagged and the back of his trousers cut away. The prisoner is wearing Ukrainian camouflage. A second video appears to show the same prisoner shot, his testicles stuffed in his mouth.
Yatsenko said the men were hard to treat. “They take a lot of antidepressants, that’s all. And we try to find some distractions for them. They can’t talk to their families or friends.
“The younger one who tried to commit suicide had a girlfriend who told him she accepted him as he was but it was too hard for him to stay with her so they are now apart.”
Last week she said he had stopped speaking.
“The other one had a girl he liked and planned to ask out but now cannot tell her. It’s all just so sad,” she said, “I will never forget.
Like many Ukrainians, Yatsenko has close links with Russia. Her father is Russian and she lived there, in Rostov, until she was 18, when she moved to Ukraine to study and never went back. They are no longer in touch.
“This thirst for violence is in Russians’ blood,” she said. “I saw it growing up. They always hated us Ukrainians, abused our women as prostitutes. When I said I was going to study in Poltava, they laughed at me.
“They can’t beat us on the battlefield, the whole world is helping us, so they do this — to demoralise us, to spread fear, to have this small revenge. It’s like blowing up the [Kakhovka] dam [on June 6], they can’t have Kherson so they destroy it.”
Doctors at the maternity hospital in Poltava said they had been consulted about women from occupied areas who had been raped by Russians then had their vaginas injected with window sealant so they can never have children.
