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CArrested and sentenced to death RussiaTortured and witness war crimesA young man from Nottingham spent months waiting for the executioner In Russian prison, unable to cry.
“I wanted to do it so desperately, I was trying to force myself to let out some emotion,” he recalls. “But because I was so scared in that place, I wasn’t able to cry. In five and a half months of captivity, I didn’t cry even once. There were moments when I wanted to, but I physically couldn’t cry.”
This is Aiden Aslin avoid dandruff war crimes myself, talking to The Independent’s world of trouble podcast.
His extraordinary life has taken him from working as a carer in Newark, Notts, to fighting alongside Kurdish militia against so-called Islamic State militants in Syria, to terrifying street battles under air attack. ukraineMariupol is surrounded.
After captivity, he has now returned to Zaporizhia in eastern Ukraine and has returned to the Ukrainian army, which he had previously joined. Russia Launched its full-scale attack in 2022.
Reflecting on my adopted country probability of victory in vladimir putin was cruel, for which the ground is ready about four yearsshe is optimistic.
“I think Russia can be defeated,” he says quietly. “I think we have the means to dismantle their economy. Obviously, it’s not going to happen overnight. At some point, it’s going to give.
“People in Russia are saying you should end it… the grip is weakening. There are a lot of things that show Russia is becoming increasingly unstable.”
Aslin is not alone in taking up arms for a country that is not his own. Thousands of foreign volunteers joined ukrainebattle after kremlin Ordered troops to overthrow the democratically elected government in Kiev and attempt to restore Ukraine’s status as a Russian colony.
But only a few were part of Ukraine’s military before Putin’s full-scale invasion. Aslin, now 31, was among those who had already responded to the call from within to fight what they saw as injustice.
He was first inspired to leave Britain to fight abroad when he watched on television the massacre of Yazidis by ISIS extremists in Syria in 2014, who attempted genocide against the community and enslaved hundreds of women.
“I never had any interest in going to Syria. But this was a defining moment in my journey where I decided I could continue to stay at home or stick to my beliefs and morals and actually do something when other people wouldn’t.”
“I felt there was a sense of injustice that the West was not doing enough to stop the atrocities that were being committed.”
He joined the Kurdish Peshmerga; A brutally efficient militia, backed by the US, UKWith French and other special forces soldiers and bombers in the fight against ISIS.
After three years, Aslin, a war veteran at the age of 23, returned UK But, by 2018, the sense of injustice that drove him to Syria led him to Kiev and a recruitment office where officials were “stunned” by the arrival of a British volunteer.
After passing training, he joined the Ukrainian Marines and received marine parachute wings. By February 2022, he was deployed on the front lines with Russian forces outside the Ukrainian-occupied city of Mariupol on the Black Sea coast, when news came that a full-scale invasion had begun. It was a “relief” after the wait, he says.
But the scale of Putin’s advance meant that his unit was forced to withdraw to the Ilyich Steelworks, close to the famous Azovstal Works, where other Ukrainian units were making their last stand in the face of Russian ground and air attacks.
“You lived like rats, you stayed underground as much as possible,” he says. “You tried to avoid going above ground because of the aviation and artillery. But I remember in the first early weeks of the siege we had a lot of artillery with which we were counter-attacking the Russians.”
Soon the Ukrainians and Aslin’s Marine unit were surrounded.
“The area was getting smaller; it got to the point where we had nothing to counter-attack with. By the first week of April, one of the neighboring units surrendered without telling us anything. And that exposed our entire right flank.”
Surrender became inevitable, and when Aslin became a prisoner of war, he expected to be shot on the spot.
At times it must have felt like an escape from what was about to happen: a British citizen accused of fighting as a mercenary for the Russians. When caught, he was beaten, and he knew worse would happen.
Taken to the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk, he encountered a Russian in blue uniform.
“He said something to me in Russian and his accent and smelled of alcohol were very strong,” he recalls. “Being me, I politely asked him if he could repeat what he said because I didn’t understand.
“As soon as I said this he beat me with the police baton. Initially I got hit on the forehead and then I fell on the floor, hit a few more times, and then I felt I got hit on my left shoulder.
“At the time I thought it had hit me on the left shoulder, but later it turned out that it had actually stabbed me.”
After this, he had to endure torture for weeks and then months. At one point a Russian interrogator stopped his attacks and lit a cigarette.
“He asked me, do I know who he is? And I said, no. And he said, ‘I am the death of you.’ She asked, ‘Do you want a beautiful death or do you want a quick death?’ And apparently I wanted a quick death.
“And she said, ‘No, you’re going to have a beautiful death.’ I fully expected to be murdered at that point. [But then] This Russian came in and said, ‘Wait, wait, you’ll kill him.’ I knew it would be bad if his superiors had to stop him.”
Aslin, accused of terrorism in a Russian court martial, faced the death penalty if found guilty along with fellow British volunteer Shaun Pinner and Moroccan Saadoune Brahim. He was assigned a lawyer, but knew he would not get anything close to a fair trial.
And before the case was heard, Aslin started cracking down.
Placed in a pre-trial facility, beatings became routine. On one occasion, Russian officers placed bags over the heads of prisoners, who were forced to crawl, roll, and slide through the corridors while being beaten.
Starved and kept in overcrowded cells, Aslin was forced to learn the Russian national anthem and sing it with the correct words every morning. When the guards shouted Putin’s name, they had to stand up in their cells and shout: “President of the world!”
At one stage during his captivity, Aslin heard a man being dragged out, beaten and tortured in the cell next door. The man’s screams faded as his body grew weaker. And when he was dragged back to his cell, the flogging continued but the victim became silent.
The prisoners living in the cell started screaming for help and shouting that the man was not breathing. The guard took 10 minutes to look inside and then he left. Another 10 minutes passed, and no doctor or medic was called until it was too late. The prisoner was dead.
After a three-day sham trial, Aslin was found guilty and sentenced to death. Yet, depressed and devoid of hope, even after being sent back to jail, he could not muster the emotional strength to cry. He was very scared.
Unknown to him, Russia realized that there was value in keeping this foreign prisoner alive. He was paraded for interviews with colleagues working for Moscow media, including British publicist Graham Phillips, who is now being investigated by the Met Police over alleged war crimes.
But this publicity kept them partially safe. In the film, Aslin did not appear to be badly injured.
Months passed, and he had no idea that he would be included in the list of prisoners of war for exchange. In a deal brokered by the intelligence services of both sides, he and others were exchanged for Russian prisoners and deported to the kingdom in September 2022 with the help of Saudi Arabia.
But it was not until he saw British officers and knew he was safe that he finally shed tears.
“I was able to cry and there was no fear of getting beaten,” he says. “It was very relieving emotionally and physically, because it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.”
Aslin returned to Britain, but his home and his heart remained in Ukraine.
He traveled to eastern Ukraine in November 2023 and rejoined the army in January 2024. He would continue to serve in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, where he would remain until the war ended.
Looking at history, he finds solace for Ukraine in the examples of Afghanistan, the Soviet Union, and even Napoleon: “On previous occasions throughout history, most of the time, the defender has won.”