I was a POW after fighting in Ukraine, Russian troops electrocuted, stabbed me and tortured us by playing non-stop Abba 

AS THE Ukrainian flag was draped around his shoulders, Shaun Pinner had just one thought - this is the moment I am going to die.

Moments later, two Russian soldiers unleashed a blast electricity from a DIY torture device that left Shaun convulsing silently in his chair.

“You can’t train for pain,” Shaun says.

“I had spent nine years in the military but nothing could prepare me for that experience.

“I’m matter of fact speaking about it now, but it is a highly emotional memory for me.”

It’s been almost three years since Shaun was captured by Russian forces and sentenced to death in a sham trial.

And now, three years after Russia invaded Ukraine, Shaun says that sharing his story now is more important than ever before.

Speaking as part of Life Stories, The Sun’s YouTube series which sees ordinary people share their extraordinary experiences, he says: “It is integral that I share my story now more than ever before.

“People must know the truth of what happened to me and what Ukraine is facing. 

“Trump's stance on the war is terrifying and it must be known that what he says is the rhetoric he’s being fed by the Kremlin, there’s no truth to it.

“The West must understand that if Ukraine falls, Europe won’t be far behind.”

Hertfordshire-born Shaun, now 50, was just 17 when he first entered the military having grown up surrounded by his grandfather’s army influence.

He says: “My dad died when I was nine and that had a major impact on my life.

“My granddad was my only real male role model and he was ex Second World War, so I was bred on things like The Longest Day and The Great Escape. 

“When I joined the military age 17, I just loved it. I loved the camaraderie and I knew this was what I wanted to do with my life.”

The ex-Royal Anglian soldier’s career spanned nine years, including time in Northern Ireland as well as tours of Bosnia, before he retired in 2000.

The ex-squaddie went on to run his own hazardous waste business, but he admits he felt restless.

“I missed the military every day,” he says.

“My business gave me what I needed but around 2018, after coming out of a long relationship, I really wanted a sense of belonging.

“I was fed up with doing the 16 hour days around working and commuting around the M25.” 

Shaun relocated to the port city of Mariupol in 2018 joining the National Guard of Ukraine to help rebuild the military after the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of East Ukraine in 2014. 

It was during this time he met his wife Laryssa.

“At this point I had a house on the left bank of Mariupol, I paid my taxes in Ukraine and I got my residency,” Shaun says.

“I had learned to speak Russian as Mariupol is a Russian speaking city and I had plenty of friends because of it.

“Ukraine was very much my home.”

The dad-of-one was sent to a frontline post north-east of port city Mariupol a few months before Vladimir Putin ordered his February 24 invasion.

By April his men had been forced back and were holed up around the Illich steel plant, on the northern edge of the city, with Ukraine’s 36th Marines. 

Hundreds more troops from the Azov battalion were trapped with their wives and children in the sprawling Azovstal steelworks on the southern edge of the city.

They had been hammered by air, tank and artillery strikes for 47 days as Russia reduced the city to a hellscape of rubble and dead bodies.

“We knew we were fighting for our lives, hoping, just hoping at that time that somebody would come in and open up a corridor and get us out,” Shaun says.

“By April we had lost 60 per cent of our platoon and it was getting harder to keep everybody together. 

“It was obvious the Russians were closing in, they were 30 metres away, we could hear them speaking and we had the constant threat of drones flying overhead too.

“It was like World War Two on steroids.”

Around 11th April, Shaun’s platoon made the decision to try and break out of the steelworks and get to a unit that was fighting the Russians on the Adolf Coast, about 130 kilometres away. 

“It was always going to be ambitious,” he says.

“We'd welded metal plates to lorries and really resembled Mad Max vehicles. It took two attempts before we managed to get out. 

“And then after about 40 minutes driving, we got out into the dark about three o'clock in the morning on the 13th of April.

“We got ambushed quite heavily, the escape plan that we had just went horribly wrong. 

“I got split up from my platoon in the dark.”

Exhausted and hungry, Shaun, who had eaten just two cabbage leaves in five days went looking for food but the nearest friendly positions were more than 80 miles away from the west and northwest of the city.

Alone, and without map or night-vision goggles, Shaun crept from building to building, moving west across the city’s outskirts in search of a highway to lead him to safety.

As dawn broke, he reached a village on the city outskirts. He changed into civilian gear, stashed his fatigues and weapon and went in search of food.

But as he advanced up a hill, Shaun felt a warning shot over his shoulder.

“I yelled out in my cockney Russian accent that I was English and not to shoot,” he says.

“I dropped my phone in a pond and then approached with my hands up.”

Shaun was hooded and taken to a company position, his hands were bound to a chair with masking tape while they checked his ID.

“I got my first punch in the face and that’s when I started my time as a prisoner of war,” he says.

“I was immediately stabbed in the leg so that I had no way of getting away.”

Shaun was taken to a tiled room with a drainage hole in the middle of the floor where he had a Ukrainian flag draped over his shoulders.

His captors mockingly asked if he wanted to phone home, as troops taped electric cables to his thumbs and used a wind-up field telephone to electrocute him.

“One of those shocks is very intense,” he says.

“It's enough to knock you really on your ass. You start dribbling. You start twitching and then somebody starts asking you questions and they were nothing like I was expecting.

“They asked if I was MI6, if I was James Bond. I had no information to give them.”

But that didn’t stop the Russians from continuing their torture.

“You can't train for pain, but you should go in with the attitude that if you're going to get captured, it's not going to be the Ritz Carlton,” Shaun says.

“When the shock stops, you just sink into your seat and I remember everything just relaxes. And I just remember letting out this amazing fart. 

“I was  chuckling to myself thinking this is just so embarrassing that I'm doing this in front of these people.

“The next day, my legs blew up very, very badly. And when I rolled down my thermal, I was bleeding from the capillaries that had burst due to the electrocutions.

Shaun was then moved to a jail dubbed “The Black Site” in Russian-held Donetsk.

Heavy metal band Slipknot as well as ABBA played 24 hours a day on a loop and he was beaten if he slept outside the times specified by guards.

Fed on a diet of occasional bread Shaun lost more than three stone in captivity, and the beatings have left him with long-term damage to his back, hips and legs.

“By the time the sham trial came around, it looked like I'd been in a deadly war camp,” Shaun says.

“My back went straight into my legs, my elbows started to protrude because we were just losing body fat. 

“We hadn't seen the daylight for 60 days and we were so malnutritioned. Your skin goes like crepe paper and your fingernails are so thin.

“I thought I was going to die of starvation before I got to any trial.”

In June 2022, he and fellow Brit Aiden Aslin were sentenced to death after beingy found guilty of terrorism by a kangaroo court.

He was moved to a different jail where Cher's Believe was played on repeat but Shaun says the conditions were ‘a little better.’

“I spent the next two or three months really climbing the walls and trying to stay positive,” Shaun says.

“The darkest times were when I was left alone in my cell for 12 hours at a time, it was much easier to keep your spirits up when you were among other men.

“When I was on my own, I just broke down in the cell, crying my eyes out, thinking I'm never going to get home.

“The thing that kept me going was what my wife said to me,  which was to live, fight, survive, it went around in my head like a mantra.

“You should never lose hope when you're in a situation like that, because if you lose hope, then you've lost everything.”

Certain he was facing his death, Shaun was astonished when he was told to pack his bag as he was going on a journey.

They were flown to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia as part of a prisoner exchange brokered by Roman Abramovich who was waiting to greet them.

West Ham fan Shaun said of the former Chelsea FC owner: “I told him he really looked like Roman Abramovich. He replied, ‘That’s because I am’.

“He said he was working with humanitarian aid.”

Within 24 hours of landing in Riyadh Shaun was on a plane back to Heathrow, landing back in the UK on 22nd of September - his wedding anniversary.

“It gives you a new look on life and and you appreciate the small things,” Shaun says. 

“It hasn’t changed me enormously, I’m still so aware I can lose everything in an instant, I learnt that as a boy.

“But I can hold my head up and say I am proud of what we achieved.”

Author Shaun, who has returned to Ukraine where he works as in humanitarian aid , says his home needs support more than ever.

“It is more important than ever that Ukraine has the support of the world behind it," he says.

“After all it’s not the hate that drives you forward in war, it’s the love you have pushing you from behind.”