Ukraine mayor says Russian soldiers who kidnapped him knew nothing about his country

By Eleanor Beardsley

Ivan Fedorov (third from left), then first deputy head of the Zaporizhzhia Regional State Administration, attends a meeting on road repairs in southeastern Ukraine in 2020. Fedorov, now the mayor of Melitopol, was abducted by Russian forces earlier this month and later freed.

Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov was held by Russian forces for five days. They told him they wanted to free his town from Nazis. “I told them in my 30 years in this town I’ve never seen a single Nazi.”

(Image credit: Dmytro Smolyenko/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

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