Stanislav Aseyev

(Ukraine, 1989) is a writer, poet and journalist. He has published the autobiographical novel The Melchior Elephant, or The Man Who Thought (2016), a poetry collection and a play. For two years, he wrote reports for the Ukrainian media from Donetsk under the pseudonym Stanislav Vasin about the situation in the occupied Donbas region. In May 2017, separatist rebels discovered his identity, and he was arrested for "extremism" and "espionage." After a month and a half in the basement of the "Ministry of State Security," he was transferred to a penal camp. Aseyev was released in December 2019 in a prisoner exchange. In 2020 he published The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, a confrontational account of tortures and mistreatments he and others suffered in the Russian-run prison camp. A collection from his reports from Donetsk were published as In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas (2021).