- Freed Marine veteran Trevor Reed detailed his experience in Russian captivity in a CNN interview.
- He said his cell was smeared with blood "all over the walls" and there was "crap everywhere."
- Reed was detained in Moscow in 2019 and returned to the US last month in a prisoner swap.
A US Marine veteran freed from years of Russian captivity last month says his cell at a Russian psychiatric treatment facility was smeared with blood and feces.
"There was blood all over the walls there — where prisoners had killed themselves, or killed other prisoners, or attempted to do that," Trevor Reed told CNN in an interview published on Friday.
"The toilet's just a hole in the floor. And there's, you know, crap everywhere, all over the floor, on the walls," Reed added. "There's people in there also that walk around that look like zombies."
Reed was detained in Moscow in 2019 and sentenced to nine years in prison after being convicted of drunkenly attacking Russian police officers.
Russian officials freed Reed in late April as part of a prisoner swap between the US and Russia.
He and his family have denied the charges against him, and his family said while their son was in captivity, they feared he broke a rib and contracted COVID-19.
In Friday's interview with CNN, Reed detailed his experience in captivity at a Russian psychiatric treatment facility, where he said he shared a cell with seven other prisoners.
Reed said he didn't sleep for days, fearing that his cellmates, some of whom he said were accused of murder and sexual assault, might harm or kill him.
"They all had severe, psychological health issues — most of 'em," he told CNN. "Inside of that cell, you know, that was not a good place."
Reed told CNN he thought Russian officials sent him to the facility as a punishment for routinely trying to appeal his conviction. He said he purposefully denied himself hope, believing he might never leave.
"And a lot of people are not going to like what I'm gonna say about this, but I kind of viewed their — having hope as being a weakness," Reed told CNN, saying he didn't want to have the hope of "being released somehow and then have that taken from me."