American Tyler Jacob was detained in Ukraine by Russian forces who he says behaved as if they thought he was James Bond.
Mr Jacob, 28, had been teaching English in Kherson in southern Ukraine. Following his return home to Minnesota, he told CNN on Tuesday that the Russians appeared to believe in the “myth” of “007” having the cover of an English teacher – Mr Jacob’s actual profession.
He was removed from a bus in Crimea, which has been controlled by Russia since the annexation of the peninsula in 2014. Mr Jacob was taken to a jail in Simferopol in the south-central part of Crimea where he was questioned and where his phone, laptop and tablet, were searched.
Mr Jacob spoke to CNN’s Don Lemon alongside his mother, Tina Hauser.
“They thought that you might be a spy,” Lemon said. “Did you have to prove to them that you weren’t a spy?”
“Yeah ... they took my laptop, my phone and my tablet, copied all the hard drives and then sifted through everything that I had,” Mr Jacob said.
“The Russians believe in this myth that 007 — the legend — his cover story is being an English teacher,” he added. “So they thought that I was like the legend.”
According to Mr Jacob, he was stopped at a checkpoint and detained for 10 days. He told CNN that after about six or seven hours of waiting in the city of Armyanskin in northern Crimea, the Russians tried to make him sign a “protocol”.
“They were trying to force me without telling me anything about it,” he said, adding that he was put in a jail cell at around 6am the next day and was later taken to court for not providing his passport.
Mr Jacob noted that two of the three captains in the Simferopol jail spoke to him in English. One of them “would wink at me when I’d get pulled to go get questioned and he would make sure that I knew that things were going well,” he said.
“As much as I’d like to say Russians are bad people for invading a sovereign country, these people were some of the nicest people I’ve met,” he said.
Mr Jacob moved to Kherson in November of last year to be with his girlfriend. They got married in January. When the city was taken by Russian forces, Mr Jacob got on a bus taking foreigners to Turkey. It was during this journey that he was captured by the Russians.
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