Simon Ostrovsky Describes His Kidnapping: Russian Roulette In Ukraine (Dispatch 31)

Jason's talking to you okay yeah I'm fine in the two days prior to uh when we were captured at the checkpoint we were trying to figure out what was happening in terms of various incidents various shootings uh but we also had a wider investigation about whether there were actual Russian citizens involved um in the pro-russia forces in eastern Ukraine that's one of the big questions that a lot of people have been trying to answer for themselves and haven't been able to answer for themselves definitively and that's what we were looking into and on reflection I think maybe that's what got them angry with us specifically on Monday I'd gone to a press conference in the morning morning outside of the uh Ukrainian Security Services building which has been now taken over by the uh pro-russia separatists and they wheeled out a Ukrainian activist SL journalist um called Irma who was let out and blindfolded and then the blindfold was taken off her and she gave an interview to a bunch of journalists and then in the afternoon at around uh 5:00 p.m. uh they were organizing a press conference in the city Administration we went into the press conference and it was one of the strangest press conferences that I ever been in because it consisted of um Stella uh and another woman uh and then the mayor telling all of the journalists that that if they were caught lying that they would be expelled from the city and that they would be watching our work and that they'd taken our names down and that they know who we are and so we better be careful what we say for [Music] [Music] for maybe actually that was the weirdest press conference ever most of what he was saying was directed towards the journalists telling us that if we were to be caught lying then we would be thrown out of town at one point he wouldn't let some journalists leave he said we had to go as a group and uh some soldiers just deleted some photographs from our camera because we' taken some pictures of some of the gunmen without their masks on I think it's really heating up here for journalists we've been working around town openly as press the entire time without uh any problems outside of the usual you know people saying don't take pictures don't take pictures and getting in our face um but when we were returning home from filming that night back to the hotel in slans there's a few checkpoints between kastor and slans uh that we went through that was perfectly fine we had a Russian journalist with us who uh waved his Russian press press credentials and that helped us get through checkpoints um uh but when we got to the final checkpoint which was literally maybe 300 400 yards away from our hotel uh a man pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket with my uh face on it shined a light on my face showed it to his friends his face lit up and he's like I got him I got him this is him and so they just opened the car door pulled us all out of the car um lined us up uh in a row next to the car um and then uh led us away into a Alleyway nearby where they lined us up again and and went through our pockets um asked everybody what their uh nationality was um and there was a group of I don't know it's hard to say but maybe about 10 people who were sort of uh circling around us with weapons and threatening us and um there was one guy who actually had a machete and said let's cut off his leg and then there was another guy with a shotgun who said let's shoot him right here and then there was a couple of other guys who were saying no no no we have to take him to the SP spu building which is the Ukrainian State security services headquarters that's now been taken over by the pro Russia forces um and it was really frightening I have to admit and really eerie because as we were being lined up in that Alleyway a uh black vulga sedan was being unloaded and somebody was pulling out what looked like a body from the back of the um car uh but I think it may have been somebody who was alive but was just being transported in the trunk of the car and then um the other four journalists including Freddy Simon Schuster and a Russian and Ukrainian journalist um were uh sort of Left Behind and I was put into the same vulga that they had just pulled a person out of the uh back of just moments earlier and they drove me silently to theu headquarters um which are just about a couple minutes away from where the checkpoint was and uh they led me out to the Courtyard behind the S spu Building and that's when things got really rough what happened first was they they pulled a hat over my eyes um then went through all of my pockets took everything I had uh out of my pocket Pockets um took my uh coat off of me um threatened to make me get on my knees didn't end up making me get on my knees uh and uh then they taped my hands behind my back um and you know threatened to shoot me a couple of times the whole procedure seemed like its purpose was uh to intimidate me as much as possible so I was led down the stairs uh into the basement of the spu with my hands tied behind my back and uh blindfold and uh I was thrown down onto the floor of the cell and made to sat in a corner um and then eventually uh I don't know maybe two or three people came in and started beating me up on the floor and I rolled over and tried to protect myself and they were kicking me and punching me in the ribs and hitting me on the head on the ears with open Palms which is pretty painful and shocking and creates like this effect of a photo flash in your brain um but doesn't actually leave any uh lasting damage and I think uh everything they were trying to do was to hurt me enough to make me scared but not hurt me bad enough uh for me to have any lasting damage that they could get blamed for in the future um and I think I kind of recognized that uh uh pretty early on and realized that they weren't punching me in the face and they weren't trying to leave any uh marks on my body um and that was actually very encouraging and I I sort of thought to myself well I mean I can probably take a beating and if if that's as bad as it's going to be then this isn't going to be so bad after all but there was also a lot of uh you know I I didn't know for sure those were the kinds of things that I was telling myself um but they also did everything that they could to make the first night as uh horrific as possible every half an hour or so somebody would come in and uh you know ask me some questions uh ask me about my ethnic background um ask me if I was a spy tell me that they could easily kill me if they wanted to and then you know leave me alone for another half an hour the effect was that you know every time I heard Footsteps in the corridor walking by I was wondering whether they were going to come in and like kick me again or um do something to me so it was uh actually pretty terrifying halfway through the night I asked him if I could uh have my hands retied in front of my body and uh they sort of lean me lean me forward and took a knife out and told me that they had a a machine gun trained on my head and that if I made a false move then my head would fall apart he cut the the tape on on my hands and then they retied my hands in the in the front of my body and you know as they were doing that they were both very close up to me and holding me and my hands were actually pressed right up against the AK that the guy was holding um and uh and then they left me alone for a few hours and I kind of slept after that um until I don't know what hour it was cuz I I had no idea whether it was even light or dark in the room I thought I was in a totally pitch dark room but eventually when I sort of gathered up a little bit of Courage I pushed the Hat a little bit up my nose so that there was a crack of uh light um between uh at the bottom of the hat and I could see that the room that I had actually been in this entire time that I thought was just a dark basement cell was actually totally lit up the entire time um and uh it was a a really filthy room um with a a sort of rollup mattress that was half rotted away and a coat that I had been put on in the corner and the walls were so damp that the plaster was coming down like as if it was sand every time time you moved uh on it and um there was water from condensation uh dripping from the ceiling the entire time so it was really hard to find a position where you wouldn't get dripped on um and uh that's how I spent I guess the first day and a half on my own until uh other people other detainees were were put into the same room with me I found out after afterwards that the mayor had been feeding journalists at press conferences all kinds of um reasons for my disappearance I think none of which were true and he was also um trying to uh keep everybody on their toes about where I was actually being held so nobody was sure um 100% whether I was abducted or where or if I was abducted where I was being held and part of the reason was because he was saying that I was actually on an exclusive assignment to write a story about the goings on inside the sbu um which was totally untrue [Music] [Music] for it was funny because uh one of the guys actually mentioned the Geneva Convention to me he told me that uh you know according to the Geneva conventions they were required to give me food water and cigarettes if I asked um and uh and they did you know so if I wanted water they gave me water if I wanted food they didn't I never asked for food they just brought food regularly I wasn't hungry after about a day and a half um some other detainees were moved into the small cell that I'd been in with me and uh they made me feel much more relaxed about what was going on because they told me what I could expect um uh and uh they were the guys who let me know that I hadn't actually actually had my real interrogation yet they were like oh you're going to you haven't they haven't you haven't they haven't questioned you in the other room oh well that's going to happen you might get beaten up kind of thing there were two sort of uh groups of guards that we had maybe even three there were our caretakers who were unarmed and wearing civilian clothing then there were uh some a group of guards who were definitely locals from Sloans the town itself um who had rag ragtag camouflage clothing that they had managed to put together themselves and then there was a higher group of what everybody in the Celler called uh the special ops guys spit and they were they're what's also called the little green men that everybody suspects to have some kind of ties to Russia but no nobody's had has been able to prove it yet um to me I couldn't verify 100% for myself whether they were Russian or not they sounded like they had Southern ACC sense to me which could be Ukrainian or from Southern Russia my true feeling about the people who were dealing with us was that they were members of that they were uh military veterans who had been member of some kind of uh uh organization uh together even before this conflict began they had this sort of nationalist religious fundamentalist Orthodox Christian ideology that they kept talking about eventually a man came in uh one of the special ops guys as we called them uh woke me up and asked me for my computer's password and I got up and I told him I was very sorry but I couldn't give him my computer's password he said okay well you want to you want to do this the hard way you can wait for the hard way and so he left the room and then uh um I sort of waited for another hour and a half until he came back you know one of the other guys was like oh you shouldn't have done that um you're going to get it pretty bad now but I think that was the whole point of not doing anything immediately was to sort of make me soak in my own expectation of uh the bad things that are going to happen to me because I refuse to cooperate so he eventually came back and uh they they they took me into the other room and they sat me down on a box um uh and I was blindfolded again first he said he asked me what the computer password was and I refused to give it to him again and then the other guy who was with him used a trunin to smack me on the arm um and then uh and then he told me that uh they'd already cracked my computer anyways and they didn't need the password from me and that I'd failed their test um and then uh he asked me if I worked for the CIA if I worked for the FBI uh if I was working for the key of government if I was a spy for the right sector um and I said I wasn't and he asked me if I was sure I said I was sure um and it was actually a pretty short interrogation and besides getting hit on the arm um with the police baton um it wasn't it wasn't that batter intense and I'd already spent almost two days by that stage there and I think they'd already figured out what the real situation was and they were just ticking boxes okay we've got to detain he we've got to interrogate him we've got to ask him the usual questions and they sort of lasted about 10 minutes and then they left the room and they left me in that room to spend the night so that night I spent alone in the big room the main change in the atmosphere of the building happened on Thursday the day of my release um when I didn't know at that point why this was happening but most of the gunmen had left the sbu building what I found out later in the day was when the gunmen came back was that there had been a gunfight and that the Ukrainian troops were moving into town and so they were preoccupied with that and even when we were asking them if we could go to use the toilet they told us that they really didn't have time for us today and and so I think that that also might have had something to do with my release because they were so busy with uh um the security situation changing on the ground for them um that they thought that having me around was maybe just too much more trouble than it was worth Roman one of the caretakers came down and told me uh get your things um you're going but he didn't actually give me my things uh and he led me upstairs and there was a cameraman for from uh the Russia television station which is a uh Kremlin uh backed state-owned media um and this Russian reporter interviewed me his name was uh yevi poov he wanted to know how i' hadd been treated um uh you what my political views were he said that I'd been accused of being a right sector spy was that true and then um you know when I told him how I'd been treated he didn't really want to dwell on that because that didn't make for good news in Russia that the pro-russia forces were beating and taking people hostages and so um he tried to shift the conversation to my view of the political situation in Ukraine overall and whether I agreed that it was the Western backed um hun in Kiev that was being sponsored by the Western governments to ferment this conflict and what the West's role was in uh fermenting the conflict and um you know what my opinion was of the key of authorities and he was trying to tease out my political uh position I I don't even know if he published that story because I felt like I didn't say anything that would have made good propaganda for them so they what they did was they said you're being released wash your face comb your hair and then they led me up to a cameraman so they'd trick me basically and then out of the blue sort of around 5: or 6:00 p.m. Roman came down with a plastic bag full of my things and said you're free to go and then I just walked walked through the barricade with my little plastic bag and uh walked past a group of gunmen I went around the corner in the direction of the hotel and uh immediately bumped into a crew uh from the Canadian Broadcasting Company I walked up to their car and they saw me and they said we've been looking for you everywhere give give us a real quick interview you have a we have an exclusive you have a bit of an exclusive but if you can drive me home that'd be more of an exclusive we'll do that so how how's the situation uh it's up spent four days in a in a in a basement with uh like three or four other guys they kept bringing in new people from the street drunks like drug PE um like people who were high and then activists and people from other parts of Ukraine some people would be held for like a day some people would be held for longer you probably don't want to stay there much longer I don't want to stay in slans uh unless I can get an official press accreditation from the mayor they're apparently giving those out um and then maybe come back and work here now that they know me but did you know may it'll be okay did you know what secure did anybody uh help secure the release or something I have no idea I literally just got out 5 minutes ago okay aloa they put me in their car and their security guard put me in the back of the car and told me to take my glasses off and to put on a beanie hat um when we were going through checkpoints I feel really great to be released um but and you know I wasn't hurt badly I was just beaten a couple of times uh which is bearable but I feel really bad for the people who are still um being held there some of them have been held for like 2 weeks there's a journalist there just a local guy who wanted to set up a webcam uh across the street from the building that we were being held in and that's the reason he was captured and um there was another guy who was from the Euro maidan protests who came to town with some right sector people and uh he was roughed up pretty bad and he's been in there for like about a week now I think that's crazy the the mayor said that um that he's still detained that I'm still detained that was the latest thing that he said yeah last word crazy maybe he's right he just don't know we just

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Keywords: VICE News, news, VICE, VICE Magazine, documentary, interviews, world news, breaking news, happening now, Ukraine (Country), Russia (Country), Crimean peninsula, Crimean War (Event), Crimea (Administrative Division), troops, war, attack, invasion, invade, Moscow, Soviet Union (Country), journalism, police, crisis, interview, Simon Ostrovsky, putin, russia, ukraine, war & conflict, crimea, russian roulette, kramatorsk, sloviansk, fredrick paxton, kidnapped journalists, ufo, aliens, bush, afghanistan, iraq

Id: tQGRJN4Radk

Length: 22min 43sec (1363 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 28 2014