When Oleksandr Usyk steps into the ring to defend his heavyweight title on Saturday night, he will not be the only Ukrainian hero in the arena.
While the world’s eyes will be fixed on Usyk as he faces Britain’s Daniel Dubois, Vladyslav Zadorin, a man who has taken more pain than any boxer could inflict, will quietly take his seat ringside.
It was Zadorin and his comrades who in the early days of Vladimir Putin’s invasion were stationed on Snake Island and famously responded to an enemy vessel: ‘Russian warship – go f**k yourself.’
The words went viral and became a symbol of Ukrainian resistance as it was feared the 80 border guards had been killed shortly after in February 2022.
But this was only the start of Zadorin’s story. He was captured and held for 679 days in Russian captivity where Putin’s thugs would torture and humiliate him and his fellow men for their defiance.
One man was forcibly stripped and raped multiple times a day and others were surgically castrated, while Zadorin was himself repeatedly beaten and electrocuted in the most sadistic manner.
It was so brutal he suffered a fractured spine and multiple broken ribs. Guards also ripped out his toenails.
The men were intentionally starved in a penal colony with Zadorin resorting to eating toilet paper, soap, mice, snails and even worms to survive.
When 26-year-old Zadorin was finally freed in January last year he had lost half his bodyweight and weighed just 60kg (9st 6lbs).
Zadorin was captured and held for 679 days in Russian captivity where Putin’s thugs would torture and humiliate him and his fellow men for their defiance
Oleksandr Usyk poses with a shirt showing support for defenders of the Azovstal steel works in Mariupol, Ukraine, as he prepares for his showdown with Daniel Dubois at Wembley
Now he has been personally invited by Usyk to Wembley Stadium to ‘draw the attention of the world’ to the recovery of Ukrainian soldiers.
This is particularly important for Zadorin as he wants everyone to know that not all of the heroes of Snake Island are out. ‘Sadly, one of us is still in captivity,’ he told the Daily Mail.
It is for this reason that Zadorin agreed to come and rub shoulders with the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and Connor McGregor in London as well as meet leading politicians.
Because anyone who hears his story will understand what motivates both Usyk, 38, and his countrymen to keep fighting the invaders both on and off the battlefield in any way they can.
‘The vast majority of Russians there seemed to have a gene for sadism,’ Zadorin tells us of his time in captivity.
‘The guards, the special forces, the interrogators – they were butchers. You got the sense they’d been selected specially for it, even competed for the “honours”.’
From his first day, Zadorin says his men were singled out for sending such a defiant message to ‘the Russian machine’.
‘Where I was held, rapes happened all the time,’ he said. ‘There was one soldier, now back home, who for months on end was raped two or three times a day by Russian criminals serving sentences in the same prison.
‘The convicts would pay the wardens, who would bring him out for rape.’
He described being ‘stripped naked and beaten on the genitals’ as well as sexual violence using a veterinary cattle prod.
For some, an even worse fate befell them. ‘This isn’t talked about openly – but men come back castrated,’ he said.
‘And they don’t just cut off the testicles – they remove the entire genitals. It’s done surgically, by people who know what they’re doing.
‘It’s not just a knife and they hack it off – no, they know exactly how to do it.’
Zadorin was constantly moved around Russian penal colonies while his captors would lie to him that Kyiv had fallen.
On several occasions he was told he was being taken out for exchange only to be returned to his cell – another cruel torture.
He tried to take his life several times. ‘I spent the whole day sitting there with one thought – that I would do it at night, end it all with the help of a bed sheet and the cell bars,’ he said, describing his torment at having falsely been told he would be freed. ‘But my cellmates saved me.’
As the days wore on with no prisoner swap, the ‘excruciating waiting just broke me’, he said. On another occasion he tried to slit his wrists but was prevented by a comrade.
They also plotted escapes, but ‘in every cell there was a rat who would snitch on us’.
Describing his most brutal days of starvation in a Kursk penal colony, Zadorin said: ‘They’d give us just three pieces of black bread – and it was inedible.
‘Either it was full of sawdust or mixed with sand. It was either raw, mouldy, or soaked through with water.
‘So we ended up eating toilet paper, soap, snails, worms – we’d hunt mice and rip them apart. Once we even tried to catch a pigeon, but we didn’t manage it.’
Finally, on January 3 last year – his mother’s birthday – he was freed in a prisoner swap. Heartwrenching footage shows him silently embracing his parents, Viktor and Katerina, both 56, as he returned home in Kropyvnytskyi, central Ukraine.
Asked if he can ever forgive the Russians, Zadorin said: ‘My hatred, I think, is embedded in my DNA now, and I’ll pass that on to my children and my grandchildren.
‘I have an overwhelming sense of vengeance. I want revenge.
‘I know everything about my torturers. I know where they live, their relatives, where they buy food, their bank cards – I know it all. And I hope that one day, out of nowhere, vengeance will find them.’
