IT WAS the heavily-accented Russian voice that Aiden Aslin heard first. A nasal warble echoing down the corridor of a filthy prison block in Ukraine’s occupied Donetsk region. “Oh my God, please don’t be who I think this is,”he muttered. Aslin, from Nottingham, was still recovering from the torment of a mock execution and being stabbed in the shoulder by a Russian guard. Now he had something else to worry about.
A door swung open. In front of him stood a shaven-headed Russian propagandist clutching a camera and a microphone.
Just a few days earlier, Aslin had been fighting for Ukraine in the siege of Mariupol, holed up in the city’s steelworks and pummelled by Russian shells.
Food and ammunition had finally run out, forcing his unit to surrender in April 2022, two months into Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Held captive in a labyrinth of Russian cells and interrogation rooms, he’d quickly learned that British POWs received “special” treatment.
“By this point, my mental health was the worst it had been since being in captivity. I’d managed to find a razor blade that was hidden in the window of our prison cell. And I remember I used to lay down on my bed at nighttime, just thinking of just ending my life.”
At regular intervals, guards would drag him from his cell to take part in filmed interviews with a string of hard-line Kremlin propagandists and conspiracy theorists. The 28-year-old would be accused of being a Nazi, and forced to sing the Russian anthem at the top of his lungs. It was all for the entertainment of tens of thousands of Putin supporters and oddballs online – lapping up videos of a Briton being humiliated before getting his comeuppance, they hoped, blindfolded and strapped to a pole, as he faced a Russian firing squad.
There was one person, in particular, among this sorry troupe of self-styled “independent journalists” who Aiden hoped he would never meet. It was the man standing before him that day in a Donetsk prison, and he wasn’t Russian at all. He was British. Not only that. He too was from Nottingham.
“He walked in and I was like, ‘Jesus’,” Aslin recalled. “Out of all the propagandists I could have possibly encountered, it had to be this guy. I knew straight away it was Graham Phillips.”
