The Guardian tells the story of Dmytro Chorny, a Ukrainian marine who spent three years in Russian captivity, enduring isolation, torture and disappearance from everyday life. His return home, his marriage to the girlfriend who never stopped waiting for him, and his struggle to live among people again come with new traumas: strangers sometimes tell him which language to speak; the sudden roar of an aircraft triggers panic; memories of Olenivka and Mordovia resurface, where he was beaten, shocked with electricity and forced to sing "Katyusha."
This is not a survival story; it is a story about what happens next.
Diana Shykot and Dmytro Chorny smile even while recalling their darkest moments. Theirs is a story of love and survival. Dmytro proposed the day after his release from captivity—in Kropyvnytskyi, where they had first begun dating. He was 15 at the time; she was 16.
Dmytro Chorny and Diana Shykot. She sent him hundreds of letters, but not a single one reached him during two years of captivity.
He had prepared a speech, but in front of his family he only exhaled: "Will you marry me?" — and dropped to one knee. Diana wrote him letters every week — with no reply. The first letter he received came after two years, and when he saw the heart she had drawn on it, he broke down in tears right in his cell.
They were married in April. "To me, he hasn't changed," says Diana. But coming home from captivity turned out not to be the end of hardship — only a new form of it.
"Sometimes I feel like I’m boiling inside," Chorny admits. Especially when someone refuses to speak Russian with him: "I was there, and you were here. Who are you to tell me what language I should speak?"
The war caught up with him near Mariupol. On the night of February 24, 2022, he heard the sound of Grad rockets. Later, while delivering ammunition to a base in a former prison building, he came under an airstrike: "I just stood there and watched. The rockets started falling everywhere… screams, everything black, smoke. I saw torn-up bodies."
Maternity hospital in Mariupol (Ukraine), damaged by shelling in March 2022.
His unit retreated to Azovstal. With the artillery wiped out, Chorny was reassigned to the infantry. "I came to terms with dying," he recalls. On March 12, he sent Diana a farewell message via Starlink: "I'm okay. I love you very much." When the signal disappeared, he borrowed a phone from a comrade and sent a single symbol: "+" — their code for "still alive."
On April 12, they were ordered to surrender. At an old farm, the prisoners were kept in chicken coops. That, Chorny says, was the last moment that could be called even remotely humane.
Dmytro Chorny is captured by Russian forces in Mariupol in April 2022.
Then came Olenivka. "You say your last name — and the first baton hits the back of your head." After that, they were transferred to Russia, passing through a penal colony near Kamyshin. On the bus, they were told: "If you fall — it’ll be worse." They were beaten while running, tortured with electroshock and spiked batons. Dmytro was forced into a ‘star’ position and tortured until he confessed. Those who didn’t know the Russian anthem or the song "Katyusha" were beaten. "It wasn’t an interrogation. It was torture."
"Meet Igor. He likes the truth," the guards would say — referring to a field telephone wired to detainees' fingers. During one of the sessions, under threat of electrocution between his legs, Dmytro gave the confessions they demanded. "I can’t talk about it."
Starting in autumn 2022, Chorny was moved from one penal colony to another — in Volgograd region, Ryazhsk, Mordovia. In prison, speaking or making eye contact was forbidden. If you moved your lips — they beat you. The radio played from six in the morning until ten at night: patriotic songs, lectures on history. Many tried to slit their wrists. People survived however they could. Dmytro made needles out of chicken bones to patch clothes falling off his emaciated body.
"Hope is a luxury. The main thing is not to think of home," he says.
Sometimes they let him write to his grandparents — but only by dictation: "I’m doing fine, the food is good...". Once, he slipped in his own words: "Sending love to my princess Diana. Let her remember me."
Shortly before his release, Chorny was given a six-minute video call with Diana. And only on April 19 was a hood placed over his head before he was put on a plane — for a swap: 246 for 246.
He spent a month in a rehabilitation center. "Physically I’m fine. Mentally — I hope I’ll manage. The hardest part is accepting that the world isn’t what I imagined."
"The very first rule — forget you were ever a citizen," he says. "Forget your girlfriend, your grandma. You were born in captivity. You live in captivity."
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