Stanislav Aseyev

Stanislav Aseyev (b. 1989) is a writer and journalist from Donbas, Ukraine, who for two years following Russia’s invasion of Eastern Ukraine authored unbiased reports about the on-the-ground reality in occupied Donbas for media outlets in Ukraine under the penname Stanislav Vasin. In June 2017, Aseyev disappeared, having been kidnapped and unlawfully imprisoned by militants from the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). Sentenced to fifteen years on trumped up terrorism charges, Aseyev spent thirty-two months in unsanctioned Donetsk prisons, where he was brutally and routinely tortured. The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, a memoir of his imprisonment and an exposé of the DPR’s unground prison system, was published in Ukrainian in 2020 and is excerpted below. In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas, a collection of Aseyev’s reportages from war-torn Donetsk, will be available in English in late summer from The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. Aseyev is also the author of the novel The Melchior Elephant, or the Man Who Thought, a collection of poetry, and a play. He is the recipient of the 2020 Free Media Award, the 2020 National Freedom of Expression Award, and the 2021 Taras Shevchenko National Prize for his journalistic writings.