Ukraine’s ‘Birdie,’ freed from captivity, recalls the horrors Russia inflicted on female POWs

KYIV, Ukraine — It was almost impossible to associate the red-haired young woman I met in a café with her experiences in the innermost circle of Russian hell. But the memories of deaths, torture, beatings, and sexual violence, witnessed and experienced, clearly haunted her even as she spoke calmly and occasionally laughed.

Kateryna Polishchuk, known throughout Ukraine as the “Birdie” of Mariupol’s Azovstal steelworks, sang for starving and dying Ukrainian troops holed up there for weeks after the February 2022 Russian invasion. Her songs — shared on social media — inspired Ukrainians still dazed by the war.

Surrounded, cut off, the Azovstal fighters finally surrendered to the Russians on May 16, 2022, and disappeared into brutal prisoner-of-war prisons where all were tortured, many murdered, and others are still held. As a combat medic, Polishchuk went with them.

Her story illustrates both the incredible courage of Ukrainian front-liners and Vladimir Putin’s determination to crush Ukrainian independence by the most brutal means.

“When the war started in 2014, I was just 12, but I knew I would join the war. I didn’t know the war would be waiting for me,” Polishchuk told me. She studied opera, then after graduation joined up as a volunteer paramedic in the Azov battalion the year before the Russian invasion.

Already in Mariupol when the war started, Polishchuk refused orders to evacuate even though injured by shrapnel, and moved to the steelworks to help wounded soldiers.

“Food and water disappeared quickly, and we had just enough to survive,” she recalled. “I had such a horrible state of feelings when my best friend died in my arms, and the next day my fiancé died the same way.” She flinched only slightly at the recollection: “I felt I was already dead and just surrendered to my situation.”

“In that bleak moment,” Polishchuk said, “I let myself be my real self and die as who I was, and I found out I was a singer.”

She was starving, filthy, and desperate. “Singing reflected my fears when we were under tank shells. I began singing to ease the many injured. It was a situation when I understood I was helpless and was just singing to help them. I didn’t even know the guys made a video. As a result, the whole world learned of us.”

That is when Polishchuk became Ptashka, or Birdie. “I was not afraid of dying but of surrender. I understood I could not trust the Russians, and me as Ptashka, it wouldn’t be easy for me.”

She was correct. Despite promises by the International Committee of the Red Cross (known as the ICRC) that Ukrainian troops would not be harmed while they were prisoners, Polishchuk said she feared the worst the moment she and her fellow soldiers surrendered. “When we were met by the Russians [after the May surrender], it was understood from the expression in their eyes that it was the end.”

She is deeply bitter at the ICRC’s failure to follow up on its assurances, especially given that the Russians brutally broke every one of those promises. “This organization [the ICRC] made me scream and shout when they called me six months later, after I was exchanged, and asked whether we had any evidence of mistreatment. I asked, ‘Are you serious?’”

Then her memories poured out. Taken to a Russian-run prison in Olenivka, inside the occupied Donbas, “I was immediately put in a 6 foot by 9 foot room with a cement floor, and I knew where I would spend my youth.” She and the other female medics were often trying to treat 60 or more injured people in a room 13 feet by 19 feet without medicine or bandages.

On July 29, 2022, a mysterious explosion tore through a men’s barracks in Olenivka, killing at least 50 people and injuring scores of others. The office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general later concluded the massacre was triggered by a thermobaric Russian grenade launched into the building — one of the conflict’s most infamous war crimes. Of course, Russia blamed Ukraine.

Polishchuk and her fellow medics were in a neighboring barracks and saw the whole incident unfold.

For three days, the women saw the Russians building trenches around the barracks, and men carrying suitcases entering the empty building. Later they learned the walls had been lined with flammable material.

On the third day, male prisoners from Azovstal were transferred into the building. Shortly before the explosion, “we saw that the number of armed guards was increased and dogs were barking,” Polishchuk said. “We saw all of this and heard the screams.”

No one was allowed to leave the burning barracks, she told me. “We heard the machine guns firing. They were burning for two hours and not released.

“No one entered until the next day. Those who had wounds without fractures were sitting in isolation for one and one-half months and then sent to barracks. When the paramedics were allowed to see the wounded, they had no means to help.”

The Russians never allowed the ICRC to visit after the massacre, or to investigate.

She clasped her hands as she recalled more horrors. She talked in a gush, and the words kept spilling out.

“The premises where we women lived were on the first floor, and all interrogations were conducted on the second floor. When they took the guys for torture, they forced them to undress on the first floor and made them crawl naked on the hallway floor and up the stairs.

“We had a radio but couldn’t overcome the noises we heard, the sounds of beatings, cries, shouts, moans,” Polishchuk said. “We never were allowed to communicate with the men. But sometimes we were able to learn what was done to them.”

Russian guards boasted to the women that they had raped male prisoners with rubber batons, Polishchuk said. As a medic, she witnessed other horrific forms of torture. “The Russians cut off pieces of skin, pulled away nails, and the men were beaten constantly. During the first month, a young guy was brought to us after torture, and the next day he was taken out dead wrapped in a sheet. We were told he hung himself. But we heard shouting from some officers to the guys who killed him not to kill POWs anymore.

“Just a week after I was released, that was when the real hell started in Taganrog” — another prison across the border in Russia to which Olenivka prisoners were sometimes transferred — “I understood how lucky I was.”

Conditions in Olenivka were horrible, Polishchuk said, “but in Taganrog, they beat women three times a day and forced them to undress and crawl along the corridor naked. They made them do a split and sit for hours. When you are stretched like that, they beat you between the legs with heavy footwear. All the women were beaten on their heads and forced to pull out their hair one by one. They humiliate them nonstop.”

“One time a woman from Taganrog was brought to us who had been three months pregnant, but they beat the baby out of her and tortured her with dogs. I know a lot of cases of heavy, severe rapes,” she said.

Polishchuk talked only briefly of the one serious rape threat against her during an interrogation. Her response to her armed attacker was to start talking incoherently and nonstop until her startled interrogator got confused and fed up.

“He didn’t expect such a reaction,” so he told the armed guards to “take this one away and never let her come here again.”

“I didn’t perceive myself as a prisoner, but as a national symbol,” Polishchuk said. “This was the only thing that let me survive. As if you are in hell and meant for death, but you have to stay alive.”

As a Ukrainian symbol, she was treated more harshly than other female prisoners, she said. “I was constantly taken for interrogations. They slapped you between the legs and threw you on the floor.

“But I decided, if you can’t change the situation, change your attitude toward the situation. These are adult guys with weapons who are beating a girl of 20. I stood up with my head proudly.”

She refused to give propaganda interviews to the fake Russian and Ukrainian separatist journalists sent to interview her. Or to drink with Russian colonels she was brought to meet who were sitting with big whiskey glasses at 10 a.m.

“I just came to terms with the idea I would die. I had nothing left. If I was tortured to death, I would be a cause for an uprising. I was living for my country and understood that my death would be a positive role.

“There was one time when the other girls [medics] asked me to sing, and the guards did also. I sang in an operatic voice, ‘hazel eyes, brown eyebrows,’ in Ukrainian. I finished this chorus, and there was a moment all over the barracks when you could hear 30 seconds of complete silence. Then one of the security guards started clapping, and then there was a huge wave of applause from the guys [we were treating] who had been tortured, and from the security guards, and the girls.

“The guards came back with cookies for each of us. And they asked, ‘What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘I am defending my country.’ The commanders were very angry at the guards for letting me sing, and I was banned from ever singing again.”

Polishchuk was released in a prisoner exchange on Sept. 21, 2022, after more than four months in captivity. Her eyes were taped, and she thought until the last moment that she was being taken to Taganrog.

Once free, she immediately reenlisted as a medic on the front lines.