The Ukrainian teens who took on Putin's gulag archipelago — and won

 

As the sky began to darken, Vladyslav Rudenko slid a pair of underwear into his hoodie and pretended to go for a walk. The 16-year-old Ukrainian boy had to hurry. He only had a slim window of time before the lanterns lit up the campgrounds of the reeducation camp, potentially exposing him to the Russian counselors. 

He left his dorm alone around 6 p.m. and wound through the campus enclosed by a two-meter-high fence topped with barbed wire. He arrived at an outdoor stage overlooking an open square where the camp’s children were required to gather every morning to sing the Russian national anthem. Vlad climbed up the stairs of the stage, dodging the security camera pointed right at it, and turned right toward a row of flag poles: a rainbow flag for the camp; another for occupied Crimea; and the blue, red and white flag of Russia. 

“Why should that be hanging there?” he thought to himself. The Russian flag didn’t represent him, a boy from the Ukrainian city of Kherson. It represented the armed men who took him from his home in balaclavas. What really belonged there, if not the Ukrainian flag, was his underwear. 

Vlad did one last scan to ensure no one was around and then grabbed the rope on the flagpole. He untied it and tugged, lowering the Russian flag as fast as he could. Once it reached the ground he unhooked it, fastened his underwear and hoisted it up the 4-meter pole. He felt his eyes popping out, his heart dropping to his stomach — the flagpole was so high — and then, a resistance. Vlad looked up and saw his blue and white checkered boxers hanging in the twilight.

“Yep,” he thought. “That’ll do.”

At first, Vlad felt overjoyed, having pulled off the most audacious stunt the camp had seen. “A story to tell to my kids,” he said. Then, his joy turned to fear. In the eyes of the Russian authorities, this was not a teenage prank. It was treason. He had to dispose of the flag immediately. He bunched it up, stuffed it under his hoodie and ran to the nearest bathroom where he met a friend. The two boys proceeded to tear the Russian flag apart, throw the pieces in the toilet and relieve themselves on it. They filmed the act with their phones and then flushed the defiled flag down the toilet. They snuck back to their rooms where they rewatched the video over and over again, laughing into the night.

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