His body still shows some almost imperceptible signs of the ordeal of 28 months in captivity. You can feel a fragility in certain movements. It's a mere trifle, compared to the men who return broken by torture, some locked in silence and nightmares, bruised forever. On the contrary, the most striking thing about Maksym Boutkevytch is the liveliness of his mind and a kind of quiet strength.
A Ukrainian pacifist and anti-militarist activist committed to defending human rights, refugees and migrants, Boutkevytch joined a Kyiv volunteer unit, the 210th special "Berlingo" battalion, as soon as the Russians invaded. Following the failure of Russian forces in Kyiv, the 210th was sent to the Donbas. Lieutenant Boutkevytch, "Moses" from his nom de guerre and eight men from his platoon were captured near Lyssychansk on June 18, 2022.
Having been surrounded at an observation post, they were falling back, guided by radio by the scout who had taken them there the day before. Suddenly, as they ran across the field, the scout ordered them to stop and said that he had been captured by the Russian army. Under threat of execution, he had lured them into a trap. Surrounded and in the line of fire of dozens of Russian soldiers, they surrendered.
Since their release on October 18 and the revelation of details of their story, commentators have been running amok on Ukrainian social media denouncing the scout's betrayal, the harshest being, as is often the case, armchair warriors who have never experienced the ordeal of being under fire. "It's war. I don't blame the scout at all. He's a nice guy I met in prison," said Boutkevytch. "And by luring us into this trap, he not only saved his life but perhaps ours too." Without radio contact, in an unfamiliar region, the fighters would most likely have been ambushed, with no offer of surrender.
Once in captivity, Boutkevytch discovered the perverse game played by the interrogation officers, the threats of rape and torture, the attempts to extract confessions, the documents that had to be signed to comply with obscure bureaucratic rules, to the point of absurdity.
Detained in the occupied province of Luhansk, annexed by Russia in September 2022, he was initially a prisoner of war, like all Ukrainian fighters. Then, after being sentenced in March 2023 to 13 years in prison by a court for a war crime allegedly committed in Sievierodonetsk, although he was not there at the time, he was incarcerated with common criminals. The only constant was the regular visits of hooded men who could only have belonged to the Russian intelligence services.
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