Newark's Aiden Aslin on his show release from Donetsk where he faced death by firing squad

In the last of the serialisation of interviews of his war in Ukraine with news editor Dan Churcher, Newark's Aiden Aslin talks about his shock release.

Aiden Aslin's release from his death sentence took the world by surprise and was something that few had feared hope for.

Held in isolation by this time, he and a Croat prisoner were taken from their cells and moved to a different part of the prison.

Initially fearing that his sentence was finally going to be carried out, Aiden suspected the worst, but then the odd questions began coming from his guards.

"You're not going to pick up a weapon again are you? Will you take part in the war again?"

Aiden thought he heard one of them mention in Russian of a prisoner exchange.

"I couldn't get my hopes up, what if I had misheard?" he said.

However, he hadn't and they were being processed for release.

In what could still be yet another cruel hoax, Aiden and others were pushed into the back of a truck and their hands and eyes were bound with duct tape and placed in a stress position where they waited two tortuous hours.

Eventually a question was asked of how many foreigners were now present and when the answer came back ten, they were placed on a second truck and driven away.

Aiden said that he had managed to free the tape around his eyes well enough to see underneath, and figured that they were heading into Russia, eventually, he could discern the sound of jet engines and realised that they had arrived at an airport terminal.

Arrival Rostov.

It was hear that ex-Chelsea Football Club owner Roman Abramovich waited for them and, a group of Saudis emerged to give them health checks to be ready to fly.

"It was so surreal," said Aiden: "It was once the plane had taken off that I fully realised we were going home."

Arrival Riyadh.

On touching down in the Saudi capital, they were taken to hospital for further health checks and then separated into nationalities to be returned to their home countries. The Foreign Office advised Aiden and his fellow Brits, John Harding, Dylan Healy, Andrew Hill and Shaun Pinner, to leave fast and be reunited with their families.

Arrival Heathrow.

"Within the space of 24 hours I had gone from solitary confinement awaiting my death sentence being carried out to hugging my family in a hotel," said Aiden.

"I had survived to tell the world what had happened.

"Most of my battalion remain prisoners of war. I got lucky.

"My Russian captors will get what's coming to them one day."

Aiden is returning to Ukraine, not as a combatant, but as a war correspondent.

"It's my home. Obviously I don't want to be captured again, but I feel there is still work to be done. There are stories that need to be told," he said.