DONETSK, Ukraine — FOR months as this region slipped deeper into war, with armed gunmen on patrol and artillery shells slamming into the regional capital daily, Aleksandr and his wife, Olga, had learned to take precautions. With people disappearing from the streets every week, they usually went everywhere together, and when apart kept in constant touch by cellphone.  But Aleksandr never thought he would run into trouble. A trained electronic engineer, at 49 he had lived in the Donetsk region for 40 years and had worked for the last 20 as a small-time merchant with his wife at the city’s open-air market. A slight man with a wiry strength, he looks like an ordinary worker in casual clothes. Luckily for him, he was fit.  “He does not drink or smoke,” said Olga, who like her husband would not give her last name out of fear for her safety.  He was on his way home from the market on Aug. 10, and had just changed buses and taken out his cellphone to call Olga so she could meet the bus. The fighting around the city had intensified and there were few people out. It was midafternoon and there was just one other passenger on the bus, a young woman.  “Two men got on the bus, one in civilian clothes and one in military fatigues,” Aleksandr recounted. The men were members of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the separatist movement that began an armed insurrection in April.  THE man in civilian clothes demanded Aleksandr’s phone. “It was a cheap Chinese phone,” he said. But this was not simple robbery. They ordered him off the bus and told him he was being detained. “Either you come with us or I shoot you,” one of them said.  Although few people dare to talk openly about what is happening in the Donetsk region, extrajudicial abductions and detentions have become commonplace. Since demonstrations against the government in Kiev began in March, the region has evolved into a strange secessionist state run by a collection of pro-Russian political and military types, among them former Communists and K.G.B. men who have brought with them more than a hint of old Communist and Soviet methods.  Rebels fighters, most of them untrained volunteers, operate checkpoints on the roads and often detain people. Residents and former detainees say most checkpoints have underground pits to keep prisoners, who are made to do chores and dig trenches.  In a routine that is reminiscent of the worst of the Stalin era, women in Donetsk now gather at the corner of the Security Service headquarters, the successor of the K.G.B., to try to learn the fate of their missing sons and husbands. Once a day a list is brought out with the names of those being held.  Officials pretend ignorance or make light of the system. “As far as illegally kept people, I don’t know about such people,” said Boris Litvinov, chairman of the Supreme Council of the Donetsk People’s Republic, the second most senior separatist official in the region, at a news conference.  When Aleksandr failed to arrive on the bus Olga began a frantic search, fearing the worst. The bus drivers and people along the route denied seeing anything. She called and visited government offices. Some took her details but nothing ever came of it. For days, the prosecutor’s office was closed, and when it finally opened she found it staffed by a volunteer and renamed the N.K.V.D., the name of the notorious Stalinist-era secret police.  “I was scared. I had heard many times of this happening,” Olga said. “I knew in some conflicts people were sent to dig trenches and they can disappear.”  Aleksandr was handcuffed by his captors, who taped his eyes and pushed him into the trunk of a car. “They brought me to a building, but I could not see anything because my eyes were bound,” he said. His captors were silent. “They did not ask anything. They said nothing.”  A FEW more people arrived and then the beating began. “They stood in a circle kicking me,” he said. “I would fall and they would yank me up and beat me again.” About five men punched and kicked him until he was covered in bruises.  “Then they tortured me with a flame,” he said, singeing the hair on the back of his neck. Next, they whipped him with a thin rubber hose, the sort that fighters wrap around the butt of their rifles to use as a tourniquet in case of injury on the battlefield.  Finally, they put a cloth bag over his head and laid him on the ground on his back. One man held his head between his legs, another sat on his stomach and a third on his legs. “They poured water on my face,” he said. “You cannot breathe like that and I lost consciousness.”  Aleksandr had never heard of waterboarding but he was subjected to it twice by his captors, and twice passed out as he fought to keep breathing. His tormentors were unknown to him but he sensed from their voices and accents that they were all from Ukraine, some of them from Donetsk, some from elsewhere.  They never really interrogated him, though they accused him of being an artillery spotter for the Ukrainian military, and asked him whom he was passing information to. They said they had been searching for him for some time. “I told them: ‘I am here every day, you don’t need to search for me.’ After that they beat me for a long time.”  They looked through his belongings and said if he had a daughter they would detain her and rape her, but said his wife was too old. They cursed him and shouted homophobic slurs. They took all his money and his cellphone.  BY evening they tired of their work. “They said I was small but did not feel pain,” Aleksandr recalled. “They realized I was maybe the wrong person.” They pushed him back into the car trunk and took him around town, stopping at three or four different checkpoints, and finally at a military base.  “By the time I got to the base they realized I could hardly breathe and could not talk and so they took me to their small hospital,” he said. “I was there for 12 days. Even the people on that base were angry that people had treated me like that.”  The men had covered their tracks well enough by passing him from one checkpoint to another.  Doctors told him his ribs had been broken in five places. His sides and legs and back were so bruised that the medics could not find a vein to give him an injection, he said.  They forced him to eat and gradually, to practice walking. That was when an acquaintance serving with the Donetsk People’s Republic recognized him. He vouched for Aleksandr and eventually got him released. Sixteen days after he was detained, they drove him out in a closed van and dropped him at a bus station with money for the fare home.  “They knew perfectly well what had happened. It is not the only case,” he said.  Olga had ended up every day with the women at the sandbagged Security Service building looking for Aleksandr’s name on the list to no avail. She and a friend visited every person and office they could think of, but found no sign of Aleksandr. “The most important thing is you feel without protection,” Olga said. “An alcoholic or a drug addict who has a gun has the power.”  The separatist leaders were trying to rule through fear, Aleksandr said. “Historically it is like what happened in 1918,” after the Bolsheviks took power, he said.  Asked if people would put up with a regime of fear, he replied, “They also feared Stalin.” Were people scared? “Very,” he answered.  A version of this article appears in print on September 13, 2014, on page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: Detained, Beaten and Tortured by Separatists in Donetsk Ordeal. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
Extrajudicial detentions have become commonplace in eastern Ukraine, where one man says his brutal ordeal ended only when his abductors realized they might have the wrong man.