22-year-old Ukrainian man rendered speechless in Russian captivity

A heartwarming video of a mother meeting her son, who returned from Russian captivity, was published by many world media.

This story was told by the Ukrainian human rights organization Media Initiative for Human Rights (MIHR).

The son, after the horrors of captivity, listens to his mother with an incredulous and even absent look, and at the end allows himself to be hugged.

“We love you terribly, we had no life without you,” the mother says and hugs her thin, bald son.

In the video, Milana Kompaniyets meets her 22-year-old son Yuriy Gulchuk, a Ukrainian Marine Brigade sailor who was released in the exchange.

 

When the war broke out, he found himself in the thick of it, in the occupied Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

On April 12, 2022, he was captured by the Russian military at the Ilyich plant.

Yuri reportedly passed through several Russian dreadful colonies in captivity.

After beatings and torture “at the reception of Dr. Evil” (as the POWs among themselves called a particularly cruel guard of the colony), Yuri stopped talking.

And because of the repeated use of a stun gun, the boy’s legs became weak.