A Ukrainian soldier, head shaven, body emaciated, steps out of a van and is handed an apple. He seems on the verge of tears, but it’s not clear if he’s about to weep or break into hysterical laughter.
“For the first time in a year, I’m eating fresh fruit,” he says with the slightest of grins. “It’s scary.”
He bites in and his eyes widen, almost like he’s in shock.
That was Maksym Kolesnikov on February 4, 2023, moments after Russia released him in a prisoner exchange — nearly a year after he was captured outside Kyiv on the opening day of the full-scale invasion. The footage made him a symbol before anyone knew his name.
A veteran of the war in the Donbas, he reenlisted on the first morning of Russia’s full-scale invasion. By that evening, he was already heading to positions near Kyiv with a group of fellow soldiers when Russian forces ambushed them.
“They began firing point-blank at our positions from their tanks,” he says. “A large number of people died, a large number of people were wounded. When it became clear that they would simply kill us all there, our commander decided to surrender.”
He describes the conditions in his prison as “a concentration camp for Ukrainians.”
“At every inspection, they used Tasers on everyone almost continuously,” he says. “They forced us, for example, to do 200 push-ups. And when you can’t go on anymore — which is inevitable after prolonged starvation and constant beatings — when we collapsed, they used tasers on us to, in their words, ‘charge’ us so that we would keep doing the exercises.”
Kolesnikov, who said he was given a daily ration of cabbage soup and a piece of bread, lost 32 kilograms (70 pounds) in captivity.
A devotee of Italian cooking before the war, he says the experience changed his relationship with food.
“I mean, I ate everything,” he explains, while cooking fresh pasta carbonara. “Whatever I bought, I would eat completely within an hour. It was very difficult to calm this down. It was a kind of ordeal. After starving for so long, I had to train myself to stop binge eating.”
Slowly but surely, Kolesnikov has restored a sense of some normalcy to his life — one that also allows him to contribute to the defense of his country. For the past year he has been working as the marketing director for a drone manufacturing company.
It is a normalcy that has even allowed him to savor food again.
During a recent trip to the grocery store, it seems hard for him to believe that he was once blown away by the taste of a simple apple.
“The apples aren’t bad,” he says as he tosses one around in his hand. Unimpressed, he throws it back in the bin. “They’re out of season here — they’ve probably been sitting around for a long time.”
Watch the episode from the five-part series “Forged by War,” co-produced by Independence Avenue Media and 1+1 Production, below.
