Putin’s American Hostage Reveals the One Sentence That Kept Him Alive

As a very loud group of U.S. lawmakers rallies for Ukraine funding to be cut off and claims the country could achieve peace if only its Western partners would stop helping, there’s someone who’d like a word with them.

He’s no armchair warrior or TV pundit—he spent more than three months in Russian captivity and just as much time before that watching battlefield horrors unfold on the ground.

“I’m 100 percent comfortable talking about that stuff, I’d like to, because I want to get the word out that yes, the Russians are committing war crimes, the [Russian proxies in occupied Donetsk] are committing war crimes,” Alexander Drueke, the U.S. veteran who spent more than 100 harrowing days enduring torture at the hands of Russia’s military before his release in September, told The Daily Beast in an interview.

Read more at The Daily Beast.