Aleksandr had never heard of waterboarding but he was subjected to it twice by his captors, and twice passed out as he fought to keep breathing. His tormentors were unknown to him but he sensed from their voices and accents that they were all from Ukraine, some of them from Donetsk, some from elsewhere.

They never really interrogated him, though they accused him of being an artillery spotter for the Ukrainian military, and asked him whom he was passing information to. They said they had been searching for him for some time. “I told them: ‘I am here every day, you don’t need to search for me.’ After that they beat me for a long time.”

They looked through his belongings and said if he had a daughter they would detain her and rape her, but said his wife was too old. They cursed him and shouted homophobic slurs. They took all his money and his cellphone.

BY evening they tired of their work. “They said I was small but did not feel pain,” Aleksandr recalled. “They realized I was maybe the wrong person.” They pushed him back into the car trunk and took him around town, stopping at three or four different checkpoints, and finally at a military base.

“By the time I got to the base they realized I could hardly breathe and could not talk and so they took me to their small hospital,” he said. “I was there for 12 days. Even the people on that base were angry that people had treated me like that.”

The men had covered their tracks well enough by passing him from one checkpoint to another.

Doctors told him his ribs had been broken in five places. His sides and legs and back were so bruised that the medics could not find a vein to give him an injection, he said.

They forced him to eat and gradually, to practice walking. That was when an acquaintance serving with the Donetsk People’s Republic recognized him. He vouched for Aleksandr and eventually got him released. Sixteen days after he was detained, they drove him out in a closed van and dropped him at a bus station with money for the fare home.