Ukrainian Soldier Shares Horrific Story of Being Shot in Face and Buried Alive by Russians: ‘I Hate Them With All My Soul’

“This is where Mykola was buried alive.”

Those stunning words are how CNN correspondent Melissa Bell introduced an interview with Mykola Kulichenko, a Ukrainian soldier with a harrowing tale of Russian soldiers torturing him and his two brothers, eventually blindfolding them and shooting them before burying them in a shallow grave. Kulichenko was the only one to survive.

Bell visited the site with Kulichenko for a segment on The Lead with Jake Tapper. Kulichenko pointed out scraps of fabric still strewn on nearby trees, identifying them as blindfolds the Russians made him and his brothers wear. He pointed out a scar on his cheek where the bullet exited, and shared how he was determined to live to tell his story to the world.

A war crimes investigation has been opened by the regional prosecutor’s office, reported Bell.

They visited the home where Kulichenko lived with his two brothers and sister. The “family’s nightmare began” on March 18, said Kulichenko, describing how Russian soldiers had come to their village looking for men who they believed had carried out an attack on a Russian convoy.

The Russians were “looking for anything that might link the brothers to the attack on the convoy,” said Bell, and they found no such evidence, but did find their grandfather’s military medal and Kulichenko’s brother’s military bag. He was a reservist in the Ukrainian Army.

Kulichenko said he and his brothers were taken from their home, blindfolded, interrogated in a cellar for four days, beaten, and taken out to the woods to be executed. Their sister heard nothing from them for four days, said Bell, “until Mykola came back from the dead.”

“I came home and there was Mykola,” said a tearful Iryna Kulichenko through a translator. “I looked at his eyes and asked, ‘Where are the others?’ He said, ‘There are no others.'”

Two months after his brothers died and he nearly joined them, Kulichenko “still struggles to speak,” Bell narrated.

“What do I think of the Russians?” he said through a translator, pausing to put his head in his hands and fight back tears. “I hate them with all my soul. They are animals. They should burn in hell.”

Kulichenko was unable to give his brothers a proper burial and tombstone for another month until the Russian withdrawal.

Watch the video above, via CNN.