Tortured into confession. The plight of Ukrainian prisoners of war

Serhiy Boichuk. Photo: Private

A court in Russian-occupied Luhansk sentenced Serhiy Boichuk, a Ukrainian prisoner of war and driver in the 108th Separate Mountain Assault Battalion of the 10th Separate Mountain Assault Brigade, to 20 years in a strict regime penal colony. When he was returned from Russian captivity in October 2024, he spoke of systematic torture and abuse. Serhiy was forced to take responsibility for a war crime — the shelling of residential buildings and the killing of a civilian in the village of Mykolaivka, Sieverskodonetsk district, Luhansk region. Another driver from the same unit, Ihor Lemeshev, and their company commander, Andriy Savchuk, were convicted on similar charges. Boichuk was captured together with them near the village of Spirne in Donetsk Oblast in July 2022.

The Ukrainian media outlet Graty analysed Boichuk’s sentence and recounts how the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation fabricated the case of the shelling of Mykolaivka.

Ambush near Spirne

A group of servicemen from the 108th Separate Mountain Assault Battalion was ambushed on July 14th, 2022. Serhiy Boichuk, who was 29 at the time, recalls that he still had a week of rest after his previous shift but responded to a request to replace his comrades at a position near the village of Spirne. This is located 50 kilometres north of Bakhmut, close to the border between the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Together with other mechanics and drivers such as Ihor Lemeshev, Maksym Sakhno, and company commander Andrii Savchuk, he set off for the village. They knew from other soldiers that the situation at these positions was extremely difficult.

“Someone had to be there anyway,” says Serhiy Boichuk.

Igor Lemeshev’s brother Serhiy recalls that he was also supposed to go with them, but the day before, he had a severe headache, took some medicine, and fell asleep. In the morning, Igor did not wake his brother but only asked that a doctor examine him.

“The guys left without me,” says Serhiy Lemeshev.

When the jeep with four Ukrainian soldiers arrived at the position, it turned out that there were Russian soldiers in the trenches.

“They let us through. We drove in and started to get out of the car — and they started shooting at us,” says Serhiy Boichuk.

He recalls that a bullet knocked his helmet off his head. He took a few steps forward to pick it up, and fell. He remembers that he could neither breathe in nor breathe out: “I shouted to the guys that I was wounded.”

A battle ensued. The Ukrainian soldiers tried to retreat, but the enemy cut off their only escape route. The soldiers called for artillery support, but there were not enough shells. There was no other help. When everyone ran out of ammunition, they were taken prisoner.

The Russians left the seriously wounded Sakhno at his position and took Boichuk, Savchuk and Lemeshev with them.

Caption: Serhiy and Igor Lemeshevs. Photo from the brothers’ social networks.

Battalion commander Volodymyr Bolekhan, who remained commander of the 108th until December 2022 and was also in positions in that area at the time, says that the operational situation was changing rapidly, the Russians were actively advancing, and Ukrainian soldiers had to engage in counterattacks in the settlements.

He saw on drone footage how the Russians led his men into the basement of one of the private houses in Spirne. He says that until they were taken further to Vrubivka, the house was not shelled so that the prisoners would not be hit.

From the first days of his captivity, Serhiy Boichuk remembers the pain from his back injury and the brutal torture during interrogations. He recalls that he had an oseledets [a traditional Ukrainian hairstyle that features a long lock of hair], which the Russians immediately cut off. The man was beaten, strangled with a dry ration bag, had a knife held to his neck or genitals, and aimed at with a pistol, with the trigger pulled and a blank shot fired. His comrades were interrogated in the same way.

“They chose which of us to shoot, [forcing] us to choose between ourselves. And since I had a wound, they tore it open with their hands — well, that’s how they interrogated us. They dragged us out to be shot many times. Then I only remember that one of us was told to say goodbye to his family,” says Serhiy.

The soldiers were transported several times to various locations where Russian units were based, including Lysychansk, Rubizhne and Sievierodonetsk, where, according to Serhiy Boichuk, they continued to be interrogated and tortured. Between interrogations, the prisoners of war were forced to perform physical labour: in Rubizhne, for example, they were ordered to unload a truck carrying Ukrainian beer.

They were then held at the Luhansk commandant’s office for two weeks. From there, Boichuk was taken to a local hospital when his wound became infected. According to Serhiy, this was also torture: surgeons cleaned the wound with a scalpel without anaesthesia. The wounded man was not given a full examination, and, despite his condition and the orders of the chief physician, he was not kept in the hospital. He was discharged and sent back to the commandant’s office. After his return from captivity, Ukrainian doctors found metal fragments in Boychuk’s back and jaw, which remained from his injury in 2022.

On July 15th, the Telegram channel of the 4th Brigade of the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) group published a video of the interrogation of Andriy Savchuk, as well as a report that fighters of the 14th Battalion “Prizrak” of this brigade had captured the commander of the 108th Battalion. In the video, a voice off camera asks, “Did anyone beat you?” Savchuk replies that no, “they helped me, gave me water and cigarettes.” His hands are clearly tied. Explosions can be heard in the background.

A few days later, on July 19th, the Russian Telegram channel “War Criminals” published a video of the interrogation of Igor Lemeshev, in which he, among other things, calls on Ukrainian soldiers to surrender and assures them that the Russians treat prisoners well. The man looks emaciated and confused.

On August 2nd, three captured soldiers from the 108th Battalion were taken to the Luhansk pre-trial detention centre. Serhiy Boichuk spent the next year and a half there. Lemeshev and Savchuk were also held there until December 2022.

Confessions under torture

Serhiy Boichuk recalls that prisoners were beaten daily in the Luhansk pre-trial detention centre, especially during the “admittance” process when they were first brought to the facility.

“Twice a day, they would take us out into the corridor for inspection. And when you run out, hands behind your head, they beat you with a police rubber baton, and you squat against the wall. Everyone runs out — they report how many people are in the cell, how many are injured, and who needs bandages. And when they call your surname, you say your name, patronymic and run back into the cell. And they beat us with these batons again,” says Boichuk about the daily life of prisoners of war in the Luhansk pre-trial detention centre.

He says that 27 people were held in a five-by-six-metre cell in completely unsanitary conditions.

In mid-August 2022, Boichuk was summoned to the investigators’ office, where he was forced to sign a cooperation agreement. Before that, the prisoner was tortured: three people beat him on the head with books, a wooden stick and rubber batons, and used electric shocks on him until they ran out of power.

“Then the head of the operational unit came in, took out another taser and hit me right under the heart with it. And he said, “Do you know what holiday it is today?” I said, “Yes, I know.” He said, “Well, you’re lucky that today is such a big holiday, we don’t want to shed blood.” And it was Makoveya [the Ukrainian religious and folk holiday], 14th August,” says Serhiy.

They put a piece of paper in front of him and told him to write down what they dictated. When he signed everything, they began to threaten to give this piece of paper to his cellmates to turn them against him.

“Then these “SKshniki” [representatives of the Investigative Committee] arrived and started to beat us up. Well, psychologically, it was very [oppressive]. They beat us there. You stand facing the wall, and one of them comes up and bangs your head against the wall. He says, “I don’t like you.” Or he hits you in the kidneys,” recalls Boichuk.

According to the man, it was the detention centre staff who carried out the beatings, but probably on the orders of the investigators.

“I think they gave this order to pressure us, to make us afraid to refuse,” says Serhiy.

At the end of August, the prisoners were lined up in the corridor and called one by one to the office where the Russian investigators were.

“One of these investigators told me that our Ukrainian authorities were trying their conscripts, and they would do the same — try us,” Boychuk recounts.

The investigator told Serhiy that he allegedly had evidence that Serhiy had fired on civilians in Mykolaivka from his BMP-1 [infantry fighting vehicle], i.e., committed a war crime. Serhiy tried to argue but quickly realized that the investigator was not interested in his explanation. Under duress, he signed some documents. He says he did not even see the text he was signing because it was covered by another sheet of paper.

A few days later, Boichuk was summoned to the investigator again and learned that a criminal case had been opened against him.

In September 2022, the prisoner was taken to an investigative experiment so that he could show where he allegedly fired from.

“I pointed in the direction with my hand. Like, the direction. It was a normal landing near the road in Luhansk itself,” says Serhiy.

Five months later, a representative of the Investigative Committee arrived again with new papers to sign. And in June 2023, another investigative experiment was conducted with the prisoner, this time in occupied Mykolaivka. Boichuk was taken together with the driver of another BMP, Igor Lemeshev, who was also later accused of shelling the civilian population.

“We went into the first house that was destroyed there. And so that it was clear that the house was destroyed, we took photos from above, and I pointed with my finger,” recalls Serhiy.

He was charged with using prohibited methods of warfare and first-degree murder committed by a group motivated by ideological hatred according to the Russian Criminal Code.

The Ukrainian prisoner of war was accused of violating the Geneva Conventions in the area where Russian forces were conducting a “special military operation”, although Russia has never recognized the fact of war with Ukraine. At the same time, Moscow believes that after February 21st, 2022, when Russia recognized the “LPR” and “DPR” (the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic), the conflict in Luhansk and Donetsk regions acquired international status. In fact, Russia actually occupied parts of these territories back in 2014, which was confirmed, in particular, by the European Court of Human Rights.

According to the investigation in early June 2022 (the verdict was made available to Graty), their battalion command gave orders to their fighters to shell civilian houses and “public places” in Mykolaivka, Popasna district, Luhansk region, to prevent local residents from leaving the village and using them to cover military facilities. Therefore, the investigation considered those soldiers who allegedly agreed to carry out this order to be accomplices in a crime committed by a group of persons by prior conspiracy.

According to the Russian investigation, Senior Soldier Boichuk had a negative attitude towards the residents of the territories controlled by the “LPR” (in which investigators included civilians from Mykolaivka, although the village was still under Ukrainian control until the end of June 2022), as he considered them pro-Russian, so he personally decided to kill them.

As stated in the case file, on June 2nd, a group of 26 Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers, including Boichuk in a BMP-1 armed with a 73 mm Grom cannon, allegedly advanced on the village. He was the first to arrive at the position at two in the afternoon.

He stopped at a distance of about a kilometre from the southern outskirts of the village, moved to the operator’s seat and fired at least five high-explosive fragmentation shells in the direction of a residential building at 58 Myru Street, even though he saw people there. As a result of this shelling, an elderly local man, Boris Degtyarenko, was killed.

“The peaceful population of Mykolaivka was destroyed in order to blame Russian military personnel for their deaths, thereby creating a negative attitude towards Russian military personnel among [other] peaceful populations, and so that the peaceful population would subsequently carry out subversive activities on their own in the liberated territories,” the Russian investigation claimed.

And they forced prisoner of war Serhiy Boichuk to agree with everything.

How Boris Degtyarenko died

Mykolaivka was actually a small village: a few main streets and a road leading to the Bakhmut-Lysychansk highway, past private houses and the stone St. Nicholas Church. Before the full-scale invasion, according to the local administration, more than a hundred local residents lived there, as well as summer residents.

The village remained under Ukrainian control until June 24th, 2022. Around April 10th, Mykolaivka lost its power supply, after which people gradually began to evacuate in their cars. But some stayed and even planted gardens, hoping that everything would calm down. Popasna had already been occupied, and volunteers who brought humanitarian aid there left it in Mykolaivka because they could not go any further. In May, heavy shelling began, so people continued to leave. By June, almost no one was left in the village — the Ukrainian military evacuated several families, as well as a wounded priest and several women from the church after it came under fire.

St. Nicholas church in Mykolaivka, Luhansk Oblast in 2013. Photo: Nikola Skuridin / Wikimedia.org

Sixty-nine-year-old Valentina Degtyarenko and her family left on May 30th under heavy shelling. The day before, the village had also been shelled, killing Uncle Borya — 83-year-old Boris Degtyarenko, Valentina’s husband’s uncle.

“It was impossible to leave the cellar! I tried to climb out to take a look, but then the shelling started, and the shock wave threw me right back into the cellar from the top step,” the woman recalls that day.

She injured her shoulder, which still hurts. Her relatives were afraid that she had died from the blow, but she survived. In the evening, they received news from acquaintances that her husband’s uncle had been killed.

His death was witnessed by another local resident, Serhiy Zhuravel, who had come to visit Boris, and they had to hide in the cellar when the shelling began. He told his relatives that as soon as Dehtyarenko went outside to look at the aftermath of the shelling, a piece of shrapnel flew at him and hit him in the head near his eye. Boris died instantly.

Valentina Degtyarenko remembers that she wanted to go to Boris, but she was held back because it was too dangerous.

“I cried at home because I couldn’t help him,” says Valentina.

Boris Degtyarenko was buried in his own yard. The woman does not know the exact date, but it happened within a few days after his death. Valentina was told about this by her fellow villagers after she had already left. According to them, Ukrainian soldiers buried him because local people were afraid to walk around the village due to the shelling.

Valentina Degtyarenko is not Boris’s only relative. He also has a stepdaughter. She used to live in Sievierodonetsk and visited her stepfather in Mykolaivka during the first months of the war, but then left the Luhansk region.

From May to June 2022, according to the estimates of the residents of Mykolaivka themselves, seven people from their village were killed, including Boris Degtyarenko. In mid-May, a car carrying five civilians from Mykolaivka came under fire near Soledar and burned down with its passengers inside. In mid-June, an 80-year-old woman was also killed: she was among those who came under fire in a church in the village. She was taken to a hospital in Bakhmut but could not be saved — she died from her injuries. She was buried in a cemetery in Bakhmut.

It is currently impossible to get to Mykolaivka. Former residents, who have scattered in different directions, say that everything there has been completely destroyed.

The “Supreme Court of the Luhansk People’s Republic” in the name of the Russian Federation

The hearing in the case of Serhiy Boichuk was scheduled for the anniversary of Ukraine’s Independence Day — August 24th 2023 — in the so-called Supreme Court of the LPR. Serhiy Boichuk was taken to Luhansk from Colony No. 38 in occupied Sverdlovsk, where he had been suddenly transferred a month earlier.

At first, the man was taken to a building opposite the court to record a video confession.

“I said that in court I would agree that I was guilty, that I had done it. But I wouldn’t record that on video. They convinced me very quickly, though. They forced me to say it on video,” Serhiy says.

He recalls that during the recording, he made a mistake with the date: he said June 6th instead of June 2nd because he did not actually know when, according to the Russians, he allegedly shelled Mykolaivka.

This video was posted on the Investigative Committee’s Telegram page after the prisoner of war was sentenced. In it, a man in camouflage and a bulletproof vest with the words “Investigative Committee” written on it stands with his back to the camera. Boichuk is wearing a black prison uniform that is clearly too large for him, his head is shaved, and he speaks Russian with difficulty.

“My legs were already failing me at that point. I could barely walk. I weighed less than 50 kilograms. I lost my eyesight and couldn’t read at all. I had serious health problems at that time,” Serhiy describes his condition.

After the video was recorded, the prisoner was taken to court in another building. The prosecution was represented by Andriy Dolgikh, a prosecutor for the military prosecutor’s office of the Joint Group of Forces — a unit based in Rostov-on-Don and created in March 2023 to participate in cases related to the war.

Before the hearing, Dolgikh approached Serhiy and advised him not to “show off”, not to “risk his health”, and to unquestioningly admit his guilt in court.

His lawyer, who was supposed to defend his interests, also asked him to confess. This was the first time Boichuk had seen his defence lawyer, although the case file states that he had a lawyer both in court and during the pre-trial investigation.

“I said to her, “Well, you understand that I didn’t do it.” She said that she had been dealing with cases like mine since 2017 and that it would be better for me to admit my guilt. She said, “They will convict you and you will be transferred sooner,”” he recalls.

Serhiy Boichuk heard the same rhetoric from some investigators in the detention centre when they forced him to confess.

The trial lasted two days.

The hearings were held behind closed doors. The judge was Yevhen Reus, who previously worked in the Ukrainian Court of Appeal in Luhansk Oblast but was dismissed from his post in 2017 for “facilitating the activities of the terrorist organisation “LPR””.

According to Serhiy Boichuk, at the beginning of the hearing, before reading out the case materials, the judge addressed him and said that he should not have taken up arms, but instead should have united with Russia and Belarus and gone to war against NATO and Europe.

Reus also warned the prisoner of war that if he refused to testify at the hearing, the court would take into account what Boichuk had said during the investigation, and he would be held criminally liable for giving false testimony.

Serhiy Boichuk only learned the details of his case in court.

When the trial began, it turned out that the victim in the case was not the deceased Boris Degtyarenko, but another resident of Mykolaivka, Serhiy Merkulov.

The media outlet Graty was able to confirm from other villagers that this man was a neighbour of the deceased. According to them, he did not work anywhere, begged for money, and was often seen drunk. Merkulov remained in Mykolaivka during the occupation, collecting scrap metal.

The case included his testimony, as well as that of witnesses and experts. These people did not appear in court in person; the prosecutor read out their testimony.

Merkulov told investigators that Degtyarenko was his good friend. He noted that Degtyarenko was allegedly clearing the rubble of the house where he lived when the shelling began.

“A shell flew in close proximity to Degtyarenko’s head, as a result of which his head was separated from his torso and burned,” the prosecutor quoted him as saying.

Merkulov testified that he carried the body of the deceased away from the house and laid it on the side of the road because there was no way to bury it, and volunteers took it from there.

According to the investigation, the “volunteers” were employees of the Vasilisa-Plus funeral home, which had been engaged in “volunteer activities related to the burial and cremation of civilian corpses” since April 2022. They took the body to the central hospital in Severodonetsk on June 4th and reported that the cause of death was mine-blast trauma.

A nurse from this hospital and the head of the Vasilisa-Plus funeral home testified in the case. They stated that they had indeed dealt with the body of an elderly man on June 4th. However, their testimony did not explain who identified him as Boris Degtyarenko or how this identification was made.

The nurse said that in May-June 2022, due to the large number of civilian deaths in Severodonetsk and other settlements, she had additional responsibilities for issuing death certificates, as well as collecting data on the locations and causes of death of people who were brought to the hospital by various volunteer organizations.

According to the woman, she did not issue a death certificate for Dehtyarenko because she did not have the technical means to do so. An autopsy was not performed on the body that was brought in, and because the relatives of the deceased did not come forward, he was cremated. She did not know where this took place, “because there was a very large flow of dead bodies, and there were also mobile cremation points that were constantly moving”.

The head of the private funeral company Vasilisa-Plus confirmed that they cremated the body in question.

The case also included a certificate from the occupation administration of the “Mykolaiv rural settlement” dated September 15th, 2022, which confirmed the death of Boris Degtyarenko on June 2nd, 2022. However, how and on what basis the officials established the fact of death three months later without a formal certificate and identified the deceased, who had probably already been cremated by that time, was not explained in court.

The prosecutor also read out the testimony of several Ukrainian prisoners of war who allegedly were in the same detention centre as Serhiy Boichuk and heard from him that he allegedly shelled residential buildings in Mykolaivka in June, although Boichuk himself says that he was never in a cell with these people and did not communicate with them.

During questioning by investigators, “Specialist Sorokin R. A.”, who trains personnel for Russian artillery units, noted that Ukraine has BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles equipped with 73-mm “Grim” cannons, with a firing range of 1,300 metres, and that the destruction of houses on the outskirts of Mykolaivka was consistent with damage caused by a shell from such a gun. He therefore suggested that Boichuk could have fired at a residential building from a landing.

The prosecutor noted that Boichuk himself showed on the map the location of the position from which he allegedly fired the shots. However, there was some confusion in the circumstances of the case: the investigation mistakenly claimed that the man had been captured a month earlier, on June 14th, rather than in July, as was actually the case. The date, month, and year of birth of the deceased were also incorrectly stated.

On August 28th, 2023, the court announced its verdict. The prisoner of war Serhiy Boichuk was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment in a strict regime colony. Boichuk was also ordered to reimburse Russia for the cost of lawyers, amounting to 13,244 roubles (145 euros).

The man recalls that after the hearing, the prosecutor approached him and threatened him not to appeal, because “it will only get worse.”

“I knew they would exchange us. Sooner or later. But it was still very hard to hear about such a sentence. I don’t even know how to describe it. Although I understood perfectly well that the war couldn’t go on for another twenty years. Sooner or later, they would exchange us. And that’s how it turned out,” says Serhiy.

Serhiy Boichuk was not in Mykolaivka

The 108th Battalion entered the Popasna front in mid-May and was still fighting there in June. Lieutenant Colonel Volodymyr Bolekhan, who was the battalion commander at the time, says that initially, the fighting in Luhansk Oblast took place near Komyshuvakha. After this, the Armed Forces of Ukraine had to retreat northwest to Vrubivka, Mykolaivka — all the way to Spirne. The front line was advancing from several sides.

Caption: Volodymyr Bolekhan. Photo from Bolekhan’s Facebook page.

Russian units advanced on Mykolaivka from the south: from the villages of Nyrkove, Lypove, and Viktorivka.

The Ukrainian military took up positions on high ground that had been equipped before the full-scale invasion because there was an air defence system there. From this stronghold, the 108th Battalion corrected their fire, while the Russians heavily shelled this position and the village with heavy artillery. As Volodymyr Bolekhan notes, on June 4th, in particular, they simultaneously fired 12 Grad rockets (Video footage of this shelling is available to Graty).

In addition, infantry advanced on Mykolaivka.

“A hundred men came every day. Our men were on the outskirts, but we didn’t let them into the village,” says the commander.

Serhiy Lemeshev recalls that in May and June, he and his brother were stationed at different positions near Mykolaivka. Serhiy remembers that his brother was able to send him a birthday present on June 6th through another driver. There was no communication between them at the time.

At the same time, the man assures that the BMPs driven by Ihor Lemeshev and Serhiy Boichuk were never used for shooting in their company. They were mainly used to evacuate the wounded.

Serhiy Boichuk confirms this and notes that driver-mechanics were not even taught how to shoot from BMPs.

“My job is to drive the vehicle and make sure it is in good working order. So that at any moment I can jump in the vehicle and drive wherever I am told to go,” he says.

According to Boichuk, on June 2nd, 2022, during the events discussed by the Russian investigation, he was in Donetsk Oblast, 100 kilometres from Mykolaivka: first in Pokrovsk, and later in the village of Novoolenivka in the Kostyantynivka district.

On June 4th, he paid with a bank card in one of the shops in Novoolenivka — this information was recorded in the online banking system.

“My BMP broke down at that very moment, and I was at the repair company for repairs,” says Serhiy Boichuk.

Serhiy Lemešev confirms that Boichuk was not with them near Mykolaivka — he joined them at the end of June in Pereizne, Donetsk Oblast.

“Igor (his brother) was still repairing the BMP (G) with him in Pereizne. Serhiy [Boychuk] was gone for a long time: a month or a month and a half. His engine seized up, and he went to the repair battalion. The repair battalion was somewhere behind, beyond Bakhmut,” recalls Lemeshev.

According to DeepState and a report by the then head of the Luhansk Regional Military Administration, Serhiy Haidai, Mykolaivka was occupied on June 24th, 2022. During the same period, Russian units also captured Sievierodonetsk and advanced on Lysychansk. The 108th Battalion was fighting in the area of the Lysychansk oil refinery at the time.

They made him a witness against his comrades

The Russians convicted all three prisoners of war from the 108th Battalion, who were captured on July 14th, 2022, for war crimes allegedly committed by them in Mykolaivka.

On August 21st, 2023, a court in Luhansk sentenced Igor Lemeshev to 20 years in a strict regime colony. The circumstances of the case are similar to those in the case of Serhiy Boichuk, except that the victim was a different civilian. Lemeshev was also forced to admit his guilt.

Andriy Savchuk in Russian captivity. Screenshot from the TFR video.

On November 18th, 2023, a verdict was announced against company commander Andriy Savchuk, who was accused of allegedly using a quadcopter in early June 2022 to direct Grad rocket fire at private houses in Mykolaivka. The court sentenced Savchuk to 16 years in a strict regime colony.

In addition, on October 30th, 2023, the Investigative Committee published a statement on its website announcing the in-absentia conviction of battalion commander Volodymyr Bolekhan. He was accused of giving the order to shell Mykolaivka with a Gvozdika 122-mm self-propelled artillery system and Grad 122-mm multiple launch rocket system in early June 2022, as a result of which two private houses were damaged. The verdict states that no civilians were harmed because they had time to go down to the basement. The Supreme Court of the LPR sentenced Bolekhan to 20 years in a maximum-security prison. According to the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, the Ukrainian commander has been placed on an international wanted list.

Volodymyr Bolekhan was unaware of this sentence. When he learned from Graty that he had been convicted, he rejected all charges and joked that he thought he would be sentenced to life imprisonment.

Serhiy Boichuk was a witness in the case against both commanders, although he insists that he did not give such testimony during the investigation and was surprised when he was brought to court to testify.

“The prosecutor read out the testimony, and I nodded my head. I didn’t even know what I was supposed to say,” says Boichuk.

The man remembers that at the trial, the accused company commander Andriy Savchuk said that the witness’s testimony was true word for word.

“They read out [in court] that I heard the conversation between the battalion commander and the company commander on the radio. In fact, everyone knows perfectly well that their channels are closed and I couldn’t hear their conversation on the radio. We had no communication between ourselves, let alone between the company commander and the battalion commander, so how could I hear what they were talking about?” explains Boichuk.

He also insists that although Andriy Savchuk was found guilty by the court, he did not even have a drone to correct the fire. Volodymyr Bolekhan confirms that at that time there were few drones in the units, and they were controlled by a single pilot who transmitted data via radio to the battalion command. The company commander did not have direct access to the drones.

One was released, two are still in captivity

After the verdict, Serhiy Boichuk was held in a Luhansk pre-trial detention centre for another six months, until early February 2024. He was then transferred to the Vakhruchevo-2 colony in the Luhansk region. In October 2024, he was exchanged along with Maksym Butkevych — they were the first and remain the only prisoners of war from this colony to be exchanged.

Serhiy Boychuk with his family. Photo: Private family collection

Andriy Savchuk and Ihor Lemeshev are still in captivity. According to the latest available information, at the end of 2025, they were first taken to a colony in Bryanka in occupied Luhansk Oblast, and from there, in January 2026, they were transferred to various penal colonies in the Russian Federation.

Maksym Sakhno is considered missing in action. The body of a deceased soldier with the same groin wound that Sakhno received during the battle and a fatal head wound was later recovered from a position near Spirne. However, it has not yet been possible to identify him with certainty. DNA testing was impossible because there was no one to compare the samples with.

Igor Lemeshev’s brother, Serhiy, was seriously wounded and lost his sight in one of the battles near Spirne in October 2022. He is undergoing rehabilitation abroad and at the same time publicizing his brother’s story, hoping to speed up Igor’s return from captivity. He says that they have always been together, supporting each other, and in February 2022 they returned from abroad, where they had been working, to defend their homeland.

Serhiy Boichuk underwent rehabilitation after captivity and returned to the army.

The article was first published in Ukrainian by Graty.

Tetiana Kozak is a co-founder and an editor-in-chief of Graty — a Ukrainian online media outlet with a focus on justice. She is co-author of the book of reportage Unrecognized Stories: A Travel to the Self-Proclaimed Reality of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Moldova published by Tempora in 2021.

POWs, Russian invasion of Ukraine, torture, Ukraine, Ukraine at war, Ukrainian army