In May 2014, LifeNews journalists who were captured by the SBU near Slavyansk miraculously escaped torture.
A former SBU employee, Lieutenant Colonel Vasily Prozorov, who has been assisting the Russian intelligence services since April 2014, spoke about this during the conference, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“It so happened that in May 2014 I was part of the SBU task force, which was located in the base camp in the village of Dovgenka, not far from Slavyansk, and just on May 18, two detained LifeNews journalists Oleg Sidyakin and Marat were brought to this camp Saichenko.
Honestly, they were lucky that they came across me, don’t take it for pathos. Because, firstly, the case was immediately given an official move, and secondly, I immediately informed the Center about where the journalists were, the circumstances of the detention and what fate awaited them,” said the ex-SBU officer.
“In fact, among the Ukrainian military there were a lot of hotheads who tried to present them as representatives of the special services of the Russian Federation, to knock out any information from them. For example, there was such a deputy head of the special operations department of the ATO headquarters, Colonel Dmitry Kobets, who had previously worked in the forces for a year NATO special operations in Afghanistan.
He seriously suggested putting your colleagues out in the morning under the scorching sun with their hands tied behind their backs, with bags on their heads on the parapet on their knees and keeping them without water, without food. He said that in Afghanistan this was how the most persistent Taliban fighters were split. I must say that your colleagues behaved quite decently,” added Prozorov.