Even after three months of captivity including threats of execution, physical torture, solitary confinement and starvation, it was the path to freedom that nearly broke freed US Army veteran Alex Drueke last week with nine other prisoners who went to help Ukraine fight off Russian invaders.
His hands were tied. His head was covered with a plastic bag, and the tape holding it in place was so tight that it caused marks on his forehead. Drueke said he and fellow American prisoner Andy Huynh had reached their limit in that state during the transit, which happened in a series of vehicles from eastern Ukraine to an airport in Russia that was surrounded by armed guards.
“For all we’ve been through and all the times we thought we might die we accepted we might die we were ready to die when he came this ride was the only time each of us independently prayed for death just to get it over with,” Drueke told The Associated Press in an interview Friday.
“The mental and emotional torture of the past 24 hours in captivity was the worst,” he said.
Drueke, 40, is recovering: the swelling is going down on his head and he is trying to regain some of the 30 pounds he thinks he lost from eating poorly. But terrible memories linger, and he doesn’t know what comes next, other than trying to draw attention to the other prisoners who remain in Russian hands.
“The war is not over,” he said, speaking from the home he shares with his mother and other relatives in Tuscaloosa.
Drueke and Huynh, another 27-year-old military veteran from Alabama, were among hundreds of Americans who traveled to Ukraine early on to help in the fight against Russia.
On June 9, they were captured during what Drueke described as a reconnaissance mission associated with the Ukrainian International Legion, made up of foreign volunteers.
“Everyone else made it back to the base vault,” he said.
Russian soldiers took the two men to their camp and then to Russia for “intensive interrogation”. While declining to go into specifics, Drueke said the treatment was brutal.
“Every one of our human rights has been violated,” he said. “We were tortured.
The men were taken back to Ukraine to a “black site” in Donetsk for nearly a month of further questioning, he said. They were eventually taken to an isolation cell block in a former Ukrainian prison. There, Drueke and Huynh were forced to record propaganda statements for a Russian video camera with soldiers in the room.
“On the plus side, there were times when they put us in a closet, tied up and blindfolded…while they waited for any reporter to show up, and it only gave Andy and I seconds to whispering things back and forth to check on each other,” he said. “It was the first time we had spoken in weeks at that time.”
Eventually, after weeks of confinement that included multiple threats, it became clear that something — either a release, a prison transfer or an execution — was in the works, said Drueke, who joined the Army Reserve. America after the September 11 terrorist attacks. 2001, and made two tours in Iraq.
“We knew something was up because our normal routine was skewed and they were taking all of our personal stuff out of the cell,” he said.
But even then the mental torture continued, he said. “One of the guards repeatedly said, ‘I’m pretty sure you’re going to get executed,'” he said.
Instead, they were part of a group of 10 men who were released on September 21 under a Saudi-brokered deal. The others who were released with them were from Croatia, Morocco, Sweden and the UK.
No one relaxed until the plane was in the air and a Saudi official explained what was happening, he said. Landing in New York after a flight from Saudi Arabia, Drueke said he and Huynh were met by a Homeland Security official from an office that investigates war crimes.
Homeland Security press officers did not immediately return an email seeking comment, but U.N. human rights investigators said Ukrainian POWs appeared to be experiencing “systematic mistreatment.” ” from the Russian kidnappers, including torture.