A Briton who was released from Russia said he was “treated worse than a dog” and was kept in solitary confinement for five months, the BBC reports. Aiden Aslin has returned to the UK after being held captive by the Russians for several months after being captured by Russian-backed forces in Ukraine, news.ro reports. He was beaten, stabbed and forced to listen to Soviet songs around the clock.

In an interview with The Sun, he said that after the stabbing he was asked if he wanted a “quick death” or a “pleasant death”.

He said that the prisoners should sing the national anthem of Russia every morning. “And if you didn’t sing, you were punished for it. You were beaten,” said the Briton.

In an interview, the former prisoner said that in captivity he was beaten with a knife – and beaten because of his tattoo.

Aslin, from Newark, Nottinghamshire, was detained in April during fighting in the southeastern city of Mariupol.

The British man was sentenced to death

He, Pinner and Moroccan citizen Brahim Saadoun were tried in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and told they face the death penalty.

Recalling the moment he was stabbed in the back, Aslin said: “I knew there was a very high possibility that I would be killed.”

Then the Russian guarding him asked, “Do you want a quick death or a beautiful death?” Responding to a quick death, Aslin was told, “You will have a beautiful death, and I will make sure it is a beautiful death.”

According to him, he was beaten because he had a tattoo with the Ukrainian trident and the fact that it shows his time in Syria.

Aslin also revealed that he was kept in a double cell with four other people and had to sleep on a carpet infested with lice. “We couldn’t go to the toilet properly because we didn’t have a toilet,” he said, adding that they had to use empty bottles.

He said he survived for three weeks on scraps of bread and water, and “in the end we had to beg them to give us tap water.”

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