A freed UK prisoner of the Ukraine conflict mentioned his Russian captors pressured him to document a heart-wrenching goodbye message to his daughter whereas tricking him into pondering he was about to face a firing squad.
John Harding, 59, recalled his torturous remedy in captivity in Ukraine after being considered one of 5 Brits freed this week and flown house by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, the former proprietor of Chelsea soccer membership.
“There have been beatings, electrocutions and extra beatings,” Harding instructed the Each day Mail of his imprisonment after surrendering on the Azov steelworks in Mariupol in Might.
“One man was stabbed within the leg … I feel they tortured us for enjoyable. It might go on for an hour to a number of hours,” he mentioned of his brutish captors, who left them “at all times blindfolded.”
Within the worst beating, his guards laughed as they put a plastic bag over his head and punched, kicked and even jumped on him for half-hour whereas his palms had been cuffed, he instructed the Solar. He broke most of his ribs and was left urinating blood.
However probably the most torturous abuse got here after he was convicted by a kangaroo court docket of conflict crimes, he instructed each retailers.
Then he was instructed he had been sentenced to dying — together with his guards making him document a goodbye video to his daughter whereas convincing him he was about to face a firing squad.
“I believed, ‘I simply want they’d f—ing kill me now,'” he instructed the Solar of his “appalling” abuse.
“If I’d have recognized how we’d be handled earlier than we surrendered, I might’ve stayed and arrange a sniper’s nest and simply tried to take just a few of them out earlier than I bought killed,” he mentioned.
The merciless remedy continued proper till he was on his airplane house, considered one of 10 foreigners launched this week, together with US army veterans Alex Drueke and Andy Huynh.
As an alternative of being instructed he was being freed, Harding mentioned he was satisfied he was being taken to his dying when he was tied up with a hood on his head at the back of a truck for a 20-hour journey out of Ukraine.
“We’d been on the ground of the truck and all that point it crossed my thoughts” that it might be his remaining journey, he recalled of being within the truck with fellow freed Brits Aiden Aslin, Dylan Healy, Andrew Hill and Shaun Pinner.
“When somebody realized we had been in Russia we had been like ‘Oh, f–okay!’ We weren’t certain if that journey was going to finish with us tied to a publish.”
That sense of doom continued till the airplane they had been jetted house on was safely away from Russia and over Egypt, he mentioned.
“Lastly, I lifted the blinds at 30,000 ft and thought for the primary time, ‘We’re not going to die,'” he instructed the Mail.
It was not the one shock on the flight.
At one level, one of many freed males, Pinner, 48, went as much as one of many passengers onboard and instructed him, “You’re the spitting picture of Roman Abramovich,” Harding instructed the Solar.
“And he went, ‘That’s as a result of I'm him!'” Harding recalled, saying they teased the ex-Chelsea boss about Pinner supporting rival London membership West Ham.
“He was truly effectively concerned within the negotiations, we discovered,” Harding mentioned of the oligarch, who was pressured to promote Chelsea amid sanctions after his homeland’s invasion of Ukraine.
“The man’s a little bit of a hero in Ukraine,” he instructed the Solar. “He’s effectively revered by Ukrainians and massively by us now, too — he’s completed a hell of lots for us and we couldn’t thank him sufficient.”
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