When Ukrainian serviceman Igor Shyshko summarised his two years of detention in Russia alongside 72-year-old US citizen Stephen Hubbard, three words came to mind: torture, humiliation, hunger.
After being held incommunicado for two and a half years, Hubbard suddenly appeared in a Moscow court last month where he was sentenced after a closed trial to nearly seven years behind bars for allegedly taking up arms and fighting for Ukraine.
He was captured in April 2022, just weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine and Washington says it has had only “limited” information on this case because Moscow has refused to share any details.
On September 27 — just 10 days before the verdict was handed down — Russia announced for the first time that it had been holding Hubbard, who appeared pale and frail in the Moscow court.
Shyshko was taken prisoner in May 2022 and released in an exchange in May 2024.
AFP first met him while he was undergoing psychological treatment in Ukraine in August of this year — before Moscow had announced that Hubbard was in their custody.
In separate interviews with AFP in September and October, he recounted having been detained with Hubbard in two Russian prisons.
The men were held in Novozybkov in the Bryansk region in western Russia from September 2022 to May 2023, sometimes in neighbouring cells.
Then, until spring 2024, they were held in the Pakino penal colony no. 7 in the Vladimir region, some 270 kilometres (168 miles) east of Moscow, where they were cellmates for a time.
The presence of a foreigner among Ukrainian prisoners of war was unusual, he told AFP.
“It wasn’t very clear why he was there,” said Shyshko, a 41-year-old with dark circles under his eyes and sunken cheeks who says he spent 801 days in total in captivity.
Shyshko said Hubbard was subjected to the same treatment as the Ukrainians: beaten, humiliated and starved by their guards, adding that he personally witnessed abuses inflicted on Stephen Hubbard and endured the same himself.
– Beaten and forced to crawl –
“They beat him all the time, like the rest of us,” Shyshko said of the prison guards’ treatment of Hubbard during an interview with AFP in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
“They hit him with sticks and truncheons and kicked him. They attacked him with dogs,” he told AFP.
“They made him run, they didn’t feed him, they made him crawl through the corridors,” Shyshko added.
The guards at Novozybkov “deliberately” hit inmates’ genitals, Shyshko said, and forced inmates, including Hubbard, to simulate sexual acts with other inmates to humiliate them.
Shyshko recounts Hubbard, with whom he had some difficulty communicating in English, had confided to him that he had been tortured in Pakino by his Russian captors with electric shocks.
The released Ukrainian serviceman said torture in Russian detention was routine, showing scars on his hands and his hearing aid needed in the wake of beatings that damaged his ears.
In an October 2024 report, the United Nations accused Russia of perpetrating “widespread and systematic” torture and mistreatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war.
The Russian foreign ministry did not respond requests for comment from AFP about Hubbard’s detention and therefore did not confirm that he was held together with Shyshko.
His account of the treatment he and other inmates suffered in detention, however, is similar to the stories told by other former prisoners.
Russian state media reported that Hubbard was taken prisoner on April 2, 2022 during the Russian occupation of Izyum, a town in the northeast of Ukraine that was liberated months later.
Kremlin-funded news outlets, citing testimony from the court, said Hubbard had moved to Izyum in 2014 to live with his Ukrainian partner, a journey that the American recounted to his Ukrainian fellow prisoner.
Moscow had accused Hubbard of joining a Ukrainian territorial defence battalion at the start of the Kremlin’s invasion and that he was paid at least $1,000 a month to fight.
Authorities in Kyiv told AFP they had found no record of Hubbard having been among Ukrainian military units.
“We haven’t found him on our lists,” said Oleksiy Dmytrashkivsky, head of the communications department of the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Forces’ command and spokesman for the Ukrainian command in occupied parts of Russia’s Kursk region.
– America, ‘the embodiment of evil’ –
Shyshko said that Hubbard was likely mistreated by Russian guards despite his age partly because of his citizenship.
“Understand, for our guards, America is the embodiment of evil. They are convinced that Americans must be annihilated,” he said.
Russian media reported that Hubbard had pleaded guilty but Shyshko described the septuagenarian as “just a civilian.”
He was unable to run and would have been far too weak to carry a weapon, Shyshko added.
You see an old man in such poor health, how could you possibly see him as a soldier?
Shyshko said that Hubbard had told him that he was stopped by Russian soldiers at a checkpoint in Izyum.
He added that the Russian soldiers saw that Hubbard was carrying cash and detained him.
Hunger was one of the abuses suffered by the detainees, Shyshko said, claiming the detainees there were deliberately malnourished and punitively denied meals.
Hubbard “always had a different opinion (from the guards) and did not do what they told him,” Shyshko said.
– ‘Doctor Death’ –
Shyshko said that in Pakino, “conditions were terrible”.
“I didn’t know that people could swell up from hunger,” he said.
Hubbard was also mistreated by a doctor nicknamed “Doctor Death”.
To “treat” scabies, this man forced inmates, including Hubbard, to live naked in cold, damp rooms for up to several weeks at a time, Shyshko said.
Hubbard repeatedly asked Russian guards for permission to contact his family, US and even Ukrainian authorities, Shyshko added.
He could not understand why the United States could not “get him out of there,” Shyshko said.
The United States has organised several prisoner exchanges with Russia, including the one that led to the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in August.
In early October, Washington accused Moscow of “refusing to grant consular access” to Hubbard and said it had only limited information on his case.
Shyshko claimed to have heard prison guards — on seeing Hubbard’s condition — voicing concerns about the potential for a scandal emerging in the event of the death of a US citizen in Russian custody.
Shyshko has been reunited with his wife and three children, but lives with severe psychological and physical repercussions of his time in Russian detention.
He said he would prefer for Hubbard to be able to return home and tell his own story.
Shyshko told AFP he was worried that Hubbard, who had lost a lot of weight, would not be able to “hold out” for much longer, either physically or mentally.
He is already “between life and death,” Shyshko said.
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