Ukrainian Marine who returned from Russian captivity non-verbal speaks again

This is reported by hromadske.ua, Ukrinform saw.

Yuriy Hulchuk of the 36th Marine Brigade spent almost two and a half years in Russian captivity. Immediately after the exchange, he was rushed to an intensive care in grave mental condition as he had become non-verbal and hardly responsive over Russia’s brutal torture practices.

He told his mother he felt as if his soul was separated from his body, that he was looking at himself as if through glass, seeing his hands near a plate with food and being unable to hold a spoon...

"He recognized my face and voice only three days later. But emotional recognition came on day 4 - he burst into tears and hugged me like a child hugs its mother. That morning, the psychiatrist said: in order for Yuriy to speak again, he would have to spend at least a year in a psychiatric ward. But his spoke seven hours after that. And he began to recover very quickly," Yuriy's mother Milana told journalists.

I came to Yuriy on the seventh day after the exchange. He was not only uttering words but expressing himself eloquently as a philologist he is, his mother said.

However, the young man remains unwilling to answer too many questions. He also resolutely stopped any attempts by his mother to look too deeply into his mind. “It's not time yet. He is just beginning to return to warmth and love, leaving Russian hate and coldness behind,” the report reads.

Before war, Yuriy diligently studied Chinese at the Kyiv National Linguistic University. In his sophomore year, in the fall of 2021, he decided to join the military force and got drafted to a Marine Corps unit. Two weeks before the full-scale war, the young man signed a contract with his brigade. He was deployed in Mariupol, where he fought battles for the local Illich Plant before being captured by the invasion force.

His mother saw his name in the POW list on a Russian website on April 18, 2022. He was initially among those held at the Olenivka penal colony, where over 50 Ukrainian POWs were killed in a terrorist attack plotted by the Russians.

On January 31, 2024, a man returned from captivity and told Yuriy’s mother that he shared the cell with her son in Mordovia. Mom found out that her son never fights with anyone over food, never compromises his cellmates before the guards, and helps sick inmates. Initially, he disobeyed orders, for which he would get severely beaten. Then he chose another way of resistance, which was silence. After a few months, one of the inmates reported to the Russians what Yuriy was actually talking to other cellmates. It is then, in June 2023, that the guards did something to him, after which he became truly nonverbal.

Yuriy is now 23 years old. After receiving treatment in a neurology unit, he will undergo rehabilitation. The young man does not rule out that he will return to his Chinese language studies.

As reported, Yuriy Hulchuk was among the released prisoners of war who returned to Ukraine on September 14. He had been captured in April 2022.