'Hell on earth': Russians played ABBA songs on loop daily to torture soldier captured while fighting for Ukraine
BEDFORDSHIRE, UK: The 48-year-old soldier Shaun Pinner, who was captured six months ago while fighting for Ukraine during the Russian siege of the port city Mariupol in April and was sentenced to death in June by a Russian proxy court in eastern Ukraine, came back home in the UK to his family on September 22. He said, while narrating his dark days in Russian-held Donetsk, “I thought I was going to die. It was hell on Earth.”
Talking to The Sun, Pinner said, "The past six months have been the worst days of my life." "I thought I was going to die. The past six months have been the worst days of my life," he said. "I never want to hear another ABBA song again. I hated them anyway so it really was torture." Pinner, who survived on bread and dirty water, was forced to listen to heavy metal band Slipknot and ABBA that played 24 hours a day on a loop. He further said, "I was surrounded by Russian separatists. They stripped me and put a knife in my thigh for no reason. They beat the daylights out of me for 20 minutes.” Pinner was electrocuted for 40 seconds each time. "It was a ferocious shock. It seemed like they were just doing it for fun," he recollected.
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After Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, Pinner married Ukrainian Larysa. Following this, Pinner, who previously served in the Royal Anglian Regiment and joined the Ukrainian army as a contract soldier, went to the Donbas region to take on pro-Moscow separatists. However, he got captured in the month of April.
"I knew it was bad so I called my wife and I gave her my death message. But she didn’t even cry. She just screamed at me that I was a warrior and that I would survive. Those were the last words I heard from her and they kept me going. It turned into carnage as the Russians ambushed us with mortar bombs and artillery. There were so many bodies, it looked like something out of a zombie apocalypse," he described and further spoke about the torture by saying, "One of the guards said he was going to kill me and send the video to my mum. They cruelly stole my wedding ring. It was my darkest day."
From dying to freedom
In June, Pinner and Aiden Aslin were sentenced to death. They were charged with being mercenaries, the violent seizure of power, and undergoing training to carry out terrorist activities. Pinner thought his end was coming, instead, he was told to pack his things and was part of a prisoner exchange brokered by Roman Abramovich, as per the report. “He said he was working with humanitarian aid. We got a picture with him and I asked him why he didn’t buy West Ham and he said because Chelsea was closer to his house. He truly did save my life."
