The mayor of Melitopol, a town in southern Ukraine occupied by the Russians, recounted today from Paris how he was arrested by Russian soldiers on March 11 and appealed to the French to defy Moscow's propaganda.
"I was in a crisis center in Melitopol, Russian soldiers came, told me I was being arrested under the pretext that I was financing an extremist Ukrainian party, which I did not even know existed," Ivan Fedorov told the BFMTV television network.
"They took me to prison, to a cell where I spent many hours without any means of communication. I could not even call my parents. I could hear screams of torture from the adjacent cells," he described.
After Ivan Fedorov was kidnapped on March 11, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz to help secure his release. Fedorov was released a few days later: the Ukrainian presidency released a video on 16 March showing Zelensky talking to him on the phone. Then, on 21 March, Tatiana Moskalkova, in charge of human rights issues in the Kremlin, announced his exchange with nine Russian prisoners.
"Why they kidnapped me"
"The Russian soldiers kidnapped me to show my colleagues what they can do to those who refuse to cooperate with Russia," the mayor told reporters, speaking in English, after meeting with French Senate President Gerard Larcher.
Fedorov also said he learned today, while in Paris, that Russian soldiers went to the homes of teachers in Melitopol to force them to adopt Russian school curricula. "They want to impose new programs on schools from April 1," he noted. "We hope this will not happen. It is dangerous for children to return to schools while Melitopol is being bombed every day."
He urged the French to defy Russian propaganda. "Russian propaganda works very well and EU citizens do not understand what is happening. They believe that war is far away (...). Citizens must understand one thing: if you are not united to help us win this war, the war will reach the European Union."
Source: APM
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