This evil must be defeated.”

“This evil must be defeated.”

Former civilian hostage Oleh Kotov died in a Kyiv hospital. For more than four years, the Russian authorities held him captive without charges or trial. Oleh was not a serviceman, just an ordinary man, a retired former police employee who lived his life in the settlement of Kozacha Lopan in Kharkiv Oblast, 3 kilometers from the Russian border. On April 23, 2022, Russian soldiers abducted him from his own home. Barely alive, he returned home only on June 5, 2026, as part of a prisoner exchange. A month and a half later, Oleh was gone.

Oleh had cancer. Kotov himself said that the Russian jailers did not provide the necessary medical care and insisted that he merely had “persistent pneumonia.” By the time he was released, the cancer had already metastasized throughout his body. The Russians deliberately dragged it out until the very end before returning Oleh in grave condition to die.

Before his death, Oleh managed to tell what he had gone through during the years of Russian captivity.

He went through basements, camps, and pretrial detention centers in the occupied territories and in Russia. He was beaten, tortured with electric current using a “slipper,” subjected to hours-long interrogations and humiliation. According to him, torture had been put on an assembly line and was used against both prisoners of war and civilian hostages.

Oleh's story is not an exception. Thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been abducted by Russian occupation forces and held for years without charges and without the right to a defense. Simply because they are Ukrainians. International organizations have repeatedly pointed out that such actions are systemic in nature and qualify as crimes against humanity.

Oleh Kotov returned home too late. He spent the last weeks of his life beside the family he had not seen for more than four years. Until the very end, Oleh did not speak of revenge or hatred. His last wish was simple:

“This evil must be defeated.”

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