Hello. I’m Dmytro Lebediev, and today we’re joined by Yuriy Gulchuk, a young Ukrainian who went through something that’s hard to even imagine. He was in Mariupol when the full-scale invasion began.

He found himself surrounded and then taken captive on April 12, 2022, and was released on September 14, 2024, spending approximately 2 years and 5 months in captivity.

This isn’t just a story about war — it’s a story about fear, resilience, struggle, and human dignity. No embellishments, no pathos — just a real voice, a living story.

Let’s hear from Yuriy.

Yuriy, you were born in Kyiv, studied here, learned Chinese, English, and Polish, practiced wushu, and traveled. Uh-huh.

What kind of person were you back then? Could you ever have imagined yourself as a soldier?

About the future… Good question.

It’s similar to the sort of preliminary questions they briefly explained to me, about what this would look like. Yeah, roughly like that.

It’s an expected question, but still a good one. It’s interesting to answer.

Honestly, I’d say I’m pretty much the same as I was before the war, about the same as during it, and probably the same after it — if I survive. That’s what I’d say. I don’t feel like anything significant has really changed for me.

Before the war, the main difference was that my hair was longer than it was during the war. Other than that—

Well, I meant internally or externally—did something change? Like, did you become more serious? Did you maybe reconsider your life principles? That’s what I meant. Or has it changed you outwardly somehow?

Um, if it has changed me, definitely less than it has changed society as a whole. Society has changed a lot — very significantly.

As for whether I myself have changed, if we’re being honest, it’s hard to judge for myself, you know? That’s really a question better asked of someone who knows me, rather than of me, because it’s genuinely hard to assess yourself.

It’s not that I’m avoiding the answer. It’s just that, in my opinion, it’s really true — it’s hard to judge yourself. It’s not an attempt to dodge the question. It’s just that, honestly, judging yourself is difficult. That’s the truth.

So, what was I like before the war? Well, when I went into the army, I thought I’d gain some courage there, you know? People say the army is a school of life, where your spirit gets tempered and all that. I felt it might be something I was lacking.

I was the kind of person who, in my habits and my approach, never liked ultimatums. That’s not my style at all—yeah—not my way of negotiating. I’m not someone who says, “This is how I want it, and now in this conversation we’ll proceed only from my vision, and we’re all going in that direction.”

That’s never been me, though people sometimes tried to shape me that way.

The times I actually gave ultimatums to someone close to me are so few I could count them on my fingers.

For example, when I went to the 195th school—a lyceum, actually—and came home to my parents and told my mom, “Either that school or nowhere. That’s it.”

That next school made such an impression on me.

But generally, that’s not my style. It never was.

So that’s just not the kind of person I’ve ever been. I never liked laying down ultimatums.

And when I did, it was extremely rare. It’s just not my way.

I’ve always preferred dialogue and cooperation. So things like saying, “Either this or nothing,” were never really my approach. It’s just not who I am.

But that one school was an exception—the 195th—because I liked it so much.

So that’s one of the few times I really put my foot down.

Otherwise, that’s not my style. That’s not how I’ve ever been.

And… after everything that happened, I—well, go on, go on—I did change a little bit. Not that my entire approach changed completely or drastically, but…

I used to be a soft person, and that was partly because people made me that way.

They’d tell me that’s how I should be, but whenever I stood my ground and pushed back, I’d get punished for it psychologically—like, with jokes or mockery.

Basically, they were training me out of it, so to speak.

For a while, when I was away from my family’s influence, that all faded away, and I was surprised to realize that, actually, that soft persona probably isn’t really me. It’s not natural for me.

That soft side just isn’t a natural part of me.

And now, part of what I’m working on is trying somehow to merge the impulses I had during those years when I was basically dancing around with a drum, running around the rehab center, going from floor to floor, entertaining people with my jokes, singing songs, dancing—

Trying to combine that impulse with, um, what I’ve gained through my experiences in recent years.

I’m trying to bring all that together into something more organic. So far, well—let’s say I’m moving in that direction, I think. I feel like I’m going the right way.

At least, that’s what my vocal coach tells me. She says I’m heading the right way.

At the very least, that’s what she keeps telling me, my singing teacher.

Got it. Let’s do it this way: I’ll ask the questions, okay? And you try to answer a bit shorter, because I’ve got a lot of questions and I want us to have time to cover everything. Deal? Straight to the point.

Alright.

You went through a very difficult period, right? I read in your biography that you were in a rehabilitation center. That was even before the war.

Please, tell us about that.

Ah, well, on September 11th—recently, either the nineteenth or twentieth, if at the end of 2021—

So, it started in September 2020, if I’m not mistaken—on September 11th, 2020—and I somehow got drunk.

Well, at that time I was singing, and I trashed my parents’ apartment. Well, not exactly my parents’, because I could say it was my apartment since I was living there at the time.

But there was a lot of pent-up anger that I hadn’t allowed myself to express, things I wouldn’t say to my parents, because they are my parents. They were an absolute authority to me then.

And I got drunk and said it all.

I smashed dishes, broke several laptops, but I didn’t hurt anyone physically—which is important for me to mention personally.

My mom hit me with a meat cleaver. She tore my shirt.

It was my favorite shirt with seagulls—a gift from a girl. It’s a symbol of the city of Marseille. I liked that shirt—seagulls wearing caps on a white background.

Anyway, because of that incident, they took me to the rehab center.

Then, on September 14th—my brother’s birthday, quite the coincidence—I was also exchanged on September 14th, but in 2024. They took me to the rehab center on September 14th.

I stayed there nine months. My dad paid for the rehab—it’s a psychological support and rehabilitation center.

They took me there. I was there for nine months. So, I knew what it was like to live behind bars, even before captivity.

But there, if I may joke, I was already prepared for that.

In a way, yes?

In a way, yes.

But if I can joke, you were already prepared for this.

In a way? Actually, if I’m serious, that’s the reason it was somewhat easier for me even while in captivity, because they didn’t hold me tightly there.

The difference was that my dad paid 15,000 so they would keep holding me.

So, it was kind of like prison, meaning they didn’t let me out on the street, they held me forcibly.

But it wasn’t considered kidnapping, because in Ukraine there’s no law about forced treatment.

It simply doesn’t exist.

So I arrived and was told to sign a paper agreeing to treatment—that was it.

Just like they usually do, so it’s easier to explain things to lawyers if needed.

But that’s how they held me.

They can bring a person in forcibly, for example, if someone got drunk, they bring them there, and keep them there forcibly.

So relatives pay to keep them there, and they don’t let them out.

If the person says, “Let me out,” they say, “You’re an alcoholic, you can’t.”

Every day of mine was spent from morning to evening being told how bad I was, that I was a scoundrel, a bug, a drug addict, a disgrace, a shame to my parents and family.

That’s how they indoctrinated me, every day, from morning till night, with that.

They fed me that narrative constantly. That was my daily routine. They kept reinforcing it day after day.

And I couldn’t leave that place. It was, well, basically violence. I ended up spending nine months there.

I calculated the damage I caused to my parents—28,000 total.

After rehab, I told Pava, “Let me pay you back.”

But when I found Pava, he said, “No, I don’t want your money.”

And then he said something strange: “If criminals could buy their way out with money,” he said, “then prisons wouldn’t exist.”

That happened while I was in training with the marine corps during my compulsory service.

So, yeah, that rehab center in a nutshell is what I went through.

Alright, thank you, Yuriy. Let’s start talking about Mariupol, and we’ll come back to other topics later.

Tell us how it all began. So, you were in Mariupol before the war started, right?

Do you remember your first day of the full-scale invasion?

I like your style. You have a pleasant manner and a nice voice.

Yes, I remember. It was February 24th. At that time, I was at the command post of the 36th brigade, in Mariupol.

I had just signed my contract. On February 7th, 2022, I signed the contract. By the way, on February 7th, 2023, I was transferred from one detention center in Russia to another.

Anyway, I like that magic of numbers.

When I read your biography, yeah, you really hit the dates precisely.

I was there, well, in captivity, in Olenivka, at such and such a place.

I just got used to it, you know. I had a lot of conversations about telling exactly what happened, from which period to which.

And because of that, I often repeated it to myself in my head, and also said it out loud often, so the exact dates stuck with me, like February 7th, 2024, because I had to.

Because I needed to remember and state those dates precisely, since when it comes to these matters, it’s important to be accurate.

Yeah, that’s it.

Just so I don’t accidentally tell it wrong, even by mistake.

So. Mariupol, February 24th — I was at the command post of the 36th Brigade, serving in the support platoon.

I remember the first artillery explosion very clearly — it happened close to our command post.

The support platoon, or the support battalion — that’s the second line, so not far from the front. It’s considered part of the sector, basically the zone where combat operations happen, but shells didn’t usually reach that far.

Usually, they didn’t fire directly at that spot. So the fact that a shell actually landed there was very unusual.

At the time, we didn’t realize, we didn’t know for sure that it was the beginning of the Russian invasion.

But we definitely felt something was off, like: “Damn, if missiles or shells are landing here, then something serious is happening.”

Honestly. Probably that explains our reaction, because it was unexpected — to hit the second line.

Before that, nothing had come that close, at least as far as I remember. And that explosion was close enough that it blew out windows. So it was actually quite a powerful blast right nearby.

From what I understand, it was probably mostly artillery fire hitting us from a distance.

It was mainly artillery strikes, coming from farther back.

That’s what it was. Mostly artillery.

So, me and a buddy of mine — this guy from the new unit, Lyonya Kurapov — we just glanced at each other with the same thought.

We’d been told in our instructions that if anything happened, we were supposed to put on our body armor and go down into the basement. We knew exactly where our body armor was stored.

But for some reason — I mean, it sounds stupid now, like a dumb reaction, but that’s probably just how it works under stress.

In a stressful situation, your brain doesn’t always work at 100% capacity, like it does right now while I’m talking to you.

So… well, after that explosion, instead of strictly following the rules, we just looked at each other and were like:

“So… wanna go eat?”

Yeah. So we went and had breakfast.

That was the first day. Honestly, even the first few minutes, you could say — because for me, everything pretty much started right after that shell explosion.

Well, and…

After leaving the command post, we moved on, and then events continued to unfold.

So, if I understand correctly, you got encircled — right? Is that how it happened?

So, what were you feeling at that moment? Maybe, what orders did you have? Was there an order to resist, or was the order not to engage in battle?

[music]

In this regard, it’s a bit easier for me when it comes to orders, because I served in BMTZ — the battalion of field support — in the material supply company, battalion, support platoon.

And my task was to wash pots, sweep the floors, clean tables, and so on.

So regardless of what the overall brigade order was — whether they were defending more, attacking more, doing tactical maneuvers — all of that… well, those decisions were made by the officers themselves.

But the supply unit’s task stays pretty much the same in any scenario, because soldiers — whether they’re defending or attacking — still need to eat, right? So supplies still have to be prepared.

So up until that point, those were the kinds of orders I personally received. For example, I’d be told to go and bring gasoline for the generator, wash a pot, bring a gas cylinder to cook food, or carry already prepared food somewhere, and so on.

So for me, in this regard, almost nothing changed. I was doing that before the full-scale war started, and I kept doing it after it began.

Only at one point, the kitchen was destroyed, so we had to prepare food for fewer people. And other units, when they came, would take food supplies and cook at their own positions.

Understood. But when it really came to being surrounded, I guess it was no longer about cooking food, right? Or maybe something else was happening — how did you see or experience the war itself?

Again, it was a bit easier for me. From my photos, you can see that, well, I didn’t lose much weight.

I actually did lose some weight during that month and a half under siege, but compared to other units, I was still in relatively good shape. I know that myself.

I was closer to the kitchen, closer to where the food was. You see? It’s basically because I was in logistics.

There was this guy, Kulbaba—I think that’s his last name—who once told me something important. He said:

“Kid, remember this: it’s better not to be somewhere ‘cool,’ better to be somewhere warm.”

This was back when I was still deciding whether to join logistics or the marine battalion. He told me, “Stay closer to the glass—that’s where you want to be.”

His advice really influenced my decision. It confirmed for me that the logistics battalion was the right choice. I wasn’t exactly doubtful before, but it definitely strengthened my feeling that I’d made the right call by choosing logistics. And later on, that proved true.

During one mission, I talked with a guy named Andriy, who said that in his battalion, things got so desperate that they even ate dogs. He said they ate a malamute. They shot it, cooked it, and ate it.

Hunger pushes people to do things like that. Eating a dog isn’t even the worst thing, honestly. Hunger drives people to desperate lengths. Believe me, people can go very far when starving. Eating a dog isn’t the worst thing. I mean, I can imagine what a starving person might do.

So yeah, that’s the sort of stuff I’ve heard about.

In our unit, nothing like that happened, although toward the end, it did get hard.

We were moving from bunker to bunker, changing positions a lot, and there was no time left for cooking. We were just finishing off whatever rations we still had. That was it.

It wasn’t the time to try to set up a field kitchen or any kind of kitchen, really. The main kitchen had been destroyed by a shell.

So, in the first days, we moved over to the factory. But they also brought us supplies from Metro.

And by Metro, I mean the Metro supermarket.

It basically got cleared out. But in essence, it wasn’t really looting, because the owner of Metro, when he left, said that the marines there—or maybe it was the National Guard or whoever was based there—could come in and take whatever they needed from Metro, and there wouldn’t be any questions about it.

So, from that point of view, it didn’t really cost him anything, right? Because he was leaving the city, leaving the store behind, and it would’ve just been looted anyway if he hadn’t said anything.

So instead, the owner gave the green light for the military to come in and take the stuff. And honestly, he did the right thing.

He was smart about it—and actually, it was the decent thing to do. Not just for his business, but as a human being, too. So in that sense, good for him. He probably made the right choice in that situation, both as a businessman and as a person.

So yeah, he probably did the right thing. I don’t know. But anyway—

The point is, they cleared out the Metro stores, and among other things, they brought back a little gas burner, like one of those small gas stoves. They also found gas cylinders over at the factory. So for us, things were okay—definitely better than for other units, which makes sense for the supply guys.

That’s basically how hard it was for logistics. But even so, we managed to bathe in warm water for a while. We’d heat up water and then go over to this separate spot that was set up for washing.

They’d even made a small bathhouse there. They brought shampoos from Metro, so we were able to keep up our hygiene for a bit, rather than just relying on wet wipes.

Mm-hm.

In field conditions, under siege, surrounded in a double ring of encirclement—that’s pretty remarkable, especially by the third or fourth week in.

Field conditions like that… I guess this was all happening toward the beginning, maybe somewhere in the middle of it all, right?

But if we’re talking about the final stage, right before the actual capture, before the order—well, let’s call it the order to surrender and go into captivity—those last days… what were they like?

For me personally, there was no direct order to surrender. I get what you’re asking, but let me explain.

They asked me what I would choose, what decision I’d make. There were three options.

One option was to change into civilian clothes and try to slip quietly out of the factory.

The second option was to try to break through the encirclement.

And the third option was to surrender and go into captivity.

By the way, I realize now—I’ve told this story so many times, in so many interviews, and I’ve repeated these same words over and over—but only now have I really thought about the fact that there wasn’t a fourth option offered: to just stay put and hold our position.

I’m only realizing that now. Crazy, right?

Anyway—

So, back to just the technical side of how it all went down. Yes, to talk more directly about the real essence of what happened. Truly.

So, they gave me three choices.

Either try to break out, surrender, or change into civilian clothes and try to sneak away quietly.