When Russian troops stormed into Borodyanka, Ukraine, in the intial days after the invasion, Vitaliy Lusyi, 43, said the young soldiers told him they were there to root out Nazis in the community 60 kilometres east of Kyiv.
But in the days that followed, as large swaths of Borodyanka were bombed and hit by airstrikes, he says soldiers began interrogating him, before torturing him over two days and forcing him to kneel in a shallow hole in the dirt.
“I was thinking of how to stay alive,” said Lusyi in an interview outside of his family home. “They were beating me hard