Mark Allen 🇺🇦

Another morning that not all Ukrainians will live to see. Zaporizhzhia. A russian strike killed a 17-year-old boy in his own bed. Four more survivors, including a 10-year-old child, were pulled from the rubble. This is how Ukraine wakes up.

Serhii Boichuk, from Ukraine’s Ternopil region, weighed 87 kg before russian captivity. He came home weighing just 49 kg. For 27 months, russia tortured him. A bullet had pierced his body armor and entered his back. His wound was packed with cotton and bandages. russian interrogators later tore the bullet wound open with their bare hands, enlarging it from a few centimetres to 15 cm. Then they jumped on his injured back and stomped on his legs. That was only the beginning. They staged his execution, putting a bag over his head and ordering him to say goodbye to his family before firing a shot above his head. They beat him for hours with his hands tied behind his back, suffocated him with plastic bags, tortured him with electric shocks, rubber batons and wooden sticks. They pressed an unloaded pistol against his head, neck and genitals, repeatedly pulling the trigger. Twice a day, interrogations turned into torture. He received his first medical treatment only on the sixth day. His wound was already infected. They cleaned it with a scalpel and tweezers, without anaesthesia. It continued festering for another six months. Up to 80 prisoners were crammed into a cell designed for 12. They had a hole in the floor instead of a toilet. Food was so scarce that he lost 26 kg in one year. Then came a sham trial. Under torture, he was forced to record a false confession and sentenced to 20 years. The russians were so careless that they copied someone else's verdict, leaving another family's names, including a wife and child, in his sentence. On October 18, 2024, Serhii finally returned home in a prisoner exchange. He survived, but the torture left him with damaged nerves in his legs, constant headaches from an untreated concussion and severe psychological trauma. Serhii survived 27 months of russian torture. Thousands of Ukrainian prisoners are still waiting to survive theirs. russia must be held accountable. #FreeUkrainianPOWs

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk: “What is happening now is a simulation of a peace process. Trump promised to end the war in 24 hours. Now he has decided to finance it. These are already the longest 24 hours in human history. Witkoff called putin a humanist. I have interviewed hundreds of people released from russian captivity. They were tortured, raped, mutilated and subjected to electric shocks. One woman told me her eye had been gouged out with a spoon. In Kyiv, I met a five-year-old girl whose mother had been abducted, tortured and repeatedly raped by russians. The girl hugged me, cried and begged: ‘Please, bring my mother back.’ My friend and colleague, journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna, was abducted, tortured and died in russian captivity. Her body was returned with several organs missing. We still do not know how she died. My friend and mentor, Professor Ihor Kozlovskyi, spent 700 days in captivity. He was tortured so brutally that he had to learn to walk again after his release. In his isolation cell, he gave philosophy lectures to rats just to hear a human voice. He told me: ‘The foundation of our existence is dignity. And dignity is action.’ 𝗗𝗜𝗚𝗡𝗜𝗧𝗬 𝗜𝗦 𝗔𝗖𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡! We have acted throughout these so-called ‘24 hours’. We acted before them, and we will keep acting for as long as it takes to bring peace. Thank you to everyone who continues to stand with us.”