“FEW THOUGHT HE WOULD RECOVER…” — After enduring a harrowing period of captivity, Mykhailo Dianov’s remarkable recovery has become a powerful symbol of resilience, determination, and hope.

His journey has inspired people around the world, proving that strength can endure even in the darkest circumstances.

Dianov was captured in mid-May with other fighters defending the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol.

According to him, Russian soldiers beat Ukrainian POWs with batons, tazed them and pushed needles under their nails.

“They beat us in the bus while they were taking us to the Investigative Committee. They beat us with their guns, with rifle stocks. For turning our heads the wrong way, for looking down the wrong way, for raising the hand wrong. I told them I couldn’t raise my hand. They punched me twice, and then they were like: ‘Oh, you can’t raise it.’ And they hit me for a third time,” Dianov said.

He also said that the POWs were fed with animal feed, water and cabbage “soup”, and small pieces of bread. They were given 30 seconds to eat everything. “If you want to destroy a person mentally and physically, just don’t give them anything to eat,” Dianov stated.

Dianov said that by the time he was captured, he had an external fixator on his broken arm after he was injured in battle. During an air raid, the man fell on his hand, bending the fixator, which made his bones grow together in a semicircle.

“The screw threads have gotten loose. There was no point in the fixator anymore. It needed to be taken off. I constantly had open wounds because of the pins sticking out, everything was rotting, the fixator got dislocated,” Dianov recalled, quoted by Meduza.

The man ended up at the Olenivka prison in the self-proclaimed Donetsk “people’s republic” along with other POWs. When explosions were reported at the prison, he was at a hospital in Donetsk, where a doctor took out his fixator using car wrenches and rusty pliers. “I asked him: ‘Maybe you can give me some kind of painkiller? This is usually done under anaesthesia.’ ‘We can inject you with Ketorolac,’ the doctor said,” Dianov recalled.