Aseyev

Mr. Aseyev said that his own persecution, and the Russians’ pummeling today of cities around Kyiv and across southern and eastern Ukraine, many of them Russian-speaking areas, belied the Kremlin’s assertion that it went to war to protect ethnic Russians and Russian speakers from the “Nazis” supposedly in control in Kyiv.

Mr. Aseyev spent the years after his release from prison trying to heal from his traumas.

In 2014, Makiivka, a place that Mr. Aseyev has described as “a city of Soviet sleepwalkers,” was occupied by Russian-backed separatist forces loyal to the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic.

Mr. Aseyev was first taken to “The Office,” a prison camp in a group of buildings along a wide boulevard in the center of Donetsk that had served as office space before the war.

There, Mr. Aseyev says he was beaten and tortured for more than two years, before being released in a prisoner exchange in 2019, just before New Year’s Eve, having spent 962 days inside.