The Banksy of Donetsk Documents His Torture

OCTOBER 21, 2014 - 08:03 AM

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When Sergey Zakharov first put up art installations and graffiti satirizing pro-Russian fighters in his native Donetsk he expected a backlash, but he didn't expect to spend the next six weeks being tortured. Now safe in Kiev and working on an illustrated book about his ordeal, Zakharov spoke to Foreign Policy about life in Donetsk and his time in captivity.

He also provided a set of drawings depicting his experience in the custody of eastern Ukraine’s rebels. They show the artist being apprehended and beaten and confined to miserable quarters.

Zakharov said he was beaten intensely and tortured for 10 days straight, during which his captors, repeatedly bludgeoning him with truncheons, broke his ribs. “In the middle of the night, sometimes the guards would get drunk and grab some of the prisoners and take us to another building where they would beat us again,” Zakharov said. “After one of the beatings, I was taken to a small iron box where two people could barely fit and left for two days under the scorching sun,” adds Zakharov. "I lost consciousness."

During his torture sessions, pro-Russian separatists told him to prepare to die and held a gun to his head. On another occasion, militants held a knife to Zakharov’s ear and threatened to cut it off.

Dubbed the "Banksy of Donetsk," Zakharov won international notoriety in July and August for his irreverent art installations depicting pro-Russian militants as devils and demons. His graffiti portrait of the prominent rebel commander Igor Strelkov holding a gun to his head under a caption riffing on the Nike slogan "Just Do It" became an instant symbol of opposition to the pro-Russian militias wreaking havoc in eastern Ukraine.

But soon after his art went viral, Zakharov found himself persona non grata in Donetsk and a target for pro-Russian militants eager to crack down on any form of dissent.

Zakharov was in his studio in early August when armed men questioned him and took him to a building in central Donetsk that used to belong to the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), which has been transformed into the headquarters for the militants’ activities. “They showed me pictures of my work and asked if I had done it. I said, ‘yes,’” Zakharov recalled. He was then handcuffed and thrown in a van with armed militants and taken back to his house, where his computer and car were scooped up and his studio ransacked.

Here, Zakharov depicts the moment he was taken away to the SBU building.

"I found out later that I was followed for a long time before being captured," Zakharov said. "I got in touch with a Russian journalist and that alerted the militants in Donetsk. They started to monitor my social media accounts and from there were able to see what I was doing." Because of a firm curfew, it was difficult for Zakharov and his fellow artists in the collective known as Myrzilka, to put up the installations under the cover of darkness. Instead the art was erected during the morning hours.

"Now I can say that I was careless -- but I just wanted to see how people would react."

Here, Zakharov puts up one of his works of art before his capture.

"At that time no one spoke out against the Donetsk People's Republic, so I was pleased to see people's positive reactions to my work," Zakharov added, speaking of the passers-by who would laugh and take photos on their phones. "To me it was evidence that despite their silence, there were still many opponents in the city."

With little explanation, Zakharov was released in late August. He then promptly met his girlfriend and was taken to the hospital, where he was determined to have 10 broken ribs. “We talked about leaving, but my passport and documents were still at the SBU building,” Zakharov said. A day after his release, Zakharov returned to the site of his torment to reclaim his documents, which would be needed to navigate the checkpoints out of the city, but was rearrested and did not leave again until nearly a month later.

Here, Zakharov depicts a cell in which he was held.

Upon his second arrest, Zakharov’s family and friends lobbied hard for his release. Zakharov’s girlfriend previously worked in law enforcement and knew some former police officers working for the Donetsk People’s Republic. After countless phone calls, one officer took an interest in the artist and eventually secured his release.

Zakharov and his girlfriend have since left Donetsk and now live in Kiev, but returning to working and normal life has been difficult. After a month-and-a-half of close confinement and physical abuse, the once-confident artist admits to struggling to cope with his experience and finds it difficult to draw now.

Still, he is devoting his time to illustrating his ordeal and hopes to publish it as a book. "It's much harder to draw than it used to be, but it's allowing me to process everything that has happened to me and my country."

via Sergey Zakharov

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If you ever find yourself sailing in the waters off Sweden's coast and come upon a Swedish Navy vessel, you are likely to hear a common joke: "Look, there goes the Swedish Navy!"

The joke, of course, being that the Swedish defense has been so gutted that it has been reduced to but one boat. That isn't quite true -- the Swedish Navy is in possession of boats, plural -- but with the country's armed forces currently carrying out a frenetic search for a mystery submarine off the coast of Stockholm, the joke has a ring of truth to it. After spending the 1980s playing cat and mouse with Soviet submarines, the Swedish submarine defense is now a shadow of its former self. Most importantly, the helicopters critical to submarine hunting were phased out in 2008.

Over the weekend, Swedes woke up to the eye-opening news that their country's military had received credible reports of "foreign underwater activity" in the dense archipelago outside Stockholm. While the Swedish authorities refuse to comment on what type of vessel they are searching for or to whom it belongs, it's almost certainly a Russian submarine.

On Sunday, Oct. 19, the Swedish authorities released a photograph showing what looks to be a periscope peeking above the surface. The man who took that photo has since come forward and says he is certain that it shows a submarine. Moreover, the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet reported that Swedish authorities intercepted an encrypted distress signal from the area in which the submarine is believed to be located. That signal was reportedly bound for the Russian naval base in Kaliningrad.

One working theory is that the submarine has been damaged and is unable to navigate out of Swedish waters. The incident comes on the heels of the Northern Archer military exercise in the Baltic Sea, which involved Swedish and Dutch forces, and some analysts have speculated that the sub was in the area to observe the exercise and gather intelligence.

The image below purports to show the vessel.

On Monday, the hunt for the mystery vessel continued, with Swedish military commanders emphasizing that they are carrying out a "surveillance" mission. The clear message to Russian authorities is that Swedish forces do not plan to fire on the vessel and would prefer that the sub not attempt to sink any Swedish ships. Parts of the archipelago have been closed to air traffic, and the search area is currently moving south, away from the capital.

But in carrying out their search, the Swedish authorities are being severely hampered by their lack of sonar-equipped helicopters. Because the Stockholm archipelago is a dense island landscape, it has become something of a notorious playground for submarines, which have ample natural features behind which to hide and evade surface vessels. Unlike ships moving on the surface, helicopters have a distinct advantage in tracking down submarines, which have great difficulty monitoring aircraft while underwater. A helicopter can quickly cover large areas, surprising submarines by dropping sonar sensors. But Sweden's fleet of anti-submarine helicopters were phased out in 2008, and the replacement isn't expected until 2018.

The cuts were part of Sweden's broader reduction in defense spending in the aftermath of the Cold War. While the notion of a Swedish military usually only draws guffaws in the United States, Sweden maintained active coastal defenses and a robust air force in the decades after the Second World War. And Sweden's Navy has been a particular point of pride, even as it is now suffering from budget cuts. Indeed, Swedish submarines participated in exercises with the U.S. Navy in the mid-2000s in which a Swedish diesel-electric submarine succeeded in sinking U.S. aircraft carriers, creating a bit of panic among American admirals.

But Sweden's military might is a function of the investments made in it, and defense spending has been steadily declining:

Russia's renewed aggressiveness in Europe -- in both Ukraine and the Baltic Sea -- is scrambling the politics of defense spending in Sweden. This year's recently concluded national election saw a renewed debate over whether Sweden should join NATO, and this weekend's submarine hunt is drawing comparisons to similar Cold War incidents.

The most infamous of those was the so-called "Whiskey on the Rocks" fiasco, in which a Soviet Whiskey-class submarine ran aground in 1981 and was discovered near a Swedish naval base by a fisherman. The boat's skipper insisted that the incident was the result of a terrible navigational error and that he had believed he was off the coast of Poland. Swedish investigators later confirmed that the boat's navigational equipment was in working order. More importantly, the approaches to the naval base in question are extremely treacherous, and the fact that the boat made it as close as it did was a remarkable feat of underwater navigation. The boat, a U-137, turned out to be carrying nuclear weapons, and its grounding turned into a diplomatic crisis that was finally resolved when the Swedes returned the sub to the Soviets after inspecting it.

The incident was an early salvo in what would come to be known as the submarine crisis of the 1980s. According to a 1990 Rand Corp. study of Soviet submarine incursions of Swedish waters, on average between 17 and 36 "foreign operations" were conducted every year in Sweden's territorial waters during the 1980s.

Russian forces have now stepped up their operations against Sweden. Last year, Russian bombers carried out a mock bombing run on Stockholm. In September, two Russian fighter jets violated Swedish airspace. And earlier this month, a Russian fighter jet buzzed a Swedish surveillance plane at a dangerously close distance. Considered against the background of Russian operations in Ukraine, these incidents have all generated considerable concern among Swedish politicians and security analysts. This weekend's submarine incident is a sort of grim cherry on top. "What's been happening in the Baltic Sea, including airspace incursions, shows that we have a new, changed situation," Peter Hultqvist, the Swedish minister of defense, said to Svenska Dagbladet.

As a result, Sweden may very well be recalibrating its defense spending. "I would be extremely surprised if what has happened this summer and is possibly now happening in the Stockholm archipelago hasn't had an impact on all parties' budget priorities," Allan Widman, a defense spokesman for one center-right party, told Svenska Dagbladet.

Then again, it may not turn out to be a Russian submarine lurking in Stockholm's waters. This is my favorite alternate explanation:

New angle for your story, @EliasGroll. pic.twitter.com/CUYM3sQBZg
— Reid Standish (@ReidStan) October 20, 2014

Graphic: Emma Carew Grovum/FP

Top photo by ANDERS WIKLUND/AFP/Getty Images