What is known about torture in Ukraine
2023.01.12 06:41
What is known about torture in Ukraine
By Ray Johnson
Budrigannews.com – Oksana Minenko, a 44-year-old accountant who lives in Kherson, Ukraine, claims that she was repeatedly detained by occupying Russian forces and subjected to torture.
She claimed that her husband, a Ukrainian soldier, died on the first day of full-scale war while defending Kherson’s Antonivskyi bridge. Minenko claims that Russian agents beat her in the face with rifle butts and submerged her hands in boiling water during several spring interrogations, removed her fingernails, and caused her to require plastic surgery.
Minenko said, “One pain grew into another,” when she was at an improvised center for humanitarian aid at the beginning of December. She had visible scars around her eyes from what she said was an operation to fix the damage. I was a dead body.”
According to interviews with more than a dozen alleged victims, members of Ukrainian law enforcement, and international prosecutors assisting Ukraine, the occupying Russian forces used electric shocks to genitals and other parts of the body, beatings, and various forms of suffocation.
Some of the people claimed that prisoners were also held for up to two months in overcrowding cells without access to adequate food or water, sanitation, or both.
Although Reuters was unable to independently verify the individual accounts shared by Minenko and other residents of Kherson, they are consistent with statements made by Ukrainian authorities and international human rights experts regarding the conditions and treatment of detainees during detention. These statements include detainees being blindfolded and bound, subjected to beatings, electric shocks, and injuries, including severe bruising and broken bones, forced nudity, and other forms of sexual violence.
According to Andriy Kovalenko, the chief war crimes prosecutor for the Kherson region, “this was done systematically, exhaustingly” to obtain information about the Ukrainian military and suspected collaborators or to punish those who were critical of the Russian occupation.
Questions from Reuters, including those concerning alleged acts of torture and unlawful detention, were not answered by the Kremlin or Russia’s defense ministry. Moscow has denied committing war crimes or targeting civilians, despite declaring a “special military operation” in Ukraine.
More than a thousand people in the Kherson region who were allegedly abducted and illegally detained by Russian forces during their months-long occupation have the country’s authorities opened pre-trial investigations, according to the most comprehensive figures on the scale of alleged torture and detentions shared exclusively with Reuters by Ukraine’s top war crimes prosecutor.
Members of Ukrainian law enforcement claim that the fact that the Kherson region has been occupied for such a longer period of time explains why the scale of the alleged crimes there appears to be significantly greater than in the vicinity of the capital, Kyiv.
Yuriy Belousov, Ukraine’s top war crimes prosecutor, stated that ten locations in the Kherson region used by Russian forces for illegal detentions have been identified. He claimed that approximately 400 people were illegally held there, in addition to approximately 200 people who were allegedly tortured or physically assaulted while being held at those locations. Following Russia’s mid-November withdrawal from Kherson city, the only regional Ukrainian capital it captured during its nearly year-long war against its Western neighbor, Ukrainian authorities say they expect the figures to rise as the investigation continues.
According to Belousov, authorities have launched nationwide pre-trial investigations into the alleged unlawful detention of more than 13,200 individuals. He stated that 1,900 investigations have been launched into allegations of maltreatment and illegal detention.
The West has ignored Russia’s allegations that Ukraine has committed war crimes and that Ukrainian soldiers have executed Russian prisoners of war. A U.N. official stated that Russian abuse was “fairly systematic,” and the United Nations reported in November that it had discovered evidence that both sides had tortured prisoners of war. In the past, Kyiv stated that it would investigate any alleged violations committed by its armed forces.
Minenko believes that her husband’s military service made her the target of her alleged attackers. She claimed that Russian forces showed up at the cemetery a week after his death and forced Minenko to kneel next to his grave and fire their automatic weapons in a mock execution.
Minenko claims that during the months of March and April, three men dressed in balaclavas and wearing Russian military uniforms entered her home at night, questioned her, and detained her. While her hands were tied to the chair and her head was covered, the men once forced her to undress and then beat her.
Minenko stated, “There is such a vacuum, you cannot breathe, you cannot do anything, you cannot defend yourself when you have a bag on your head and you are being beaten.”
Europe was thrown into its most extensive land conflict since World War II when Moscow invaded Ukraine in February. Russia withdrew its troops from Kherson city in November, stating that it was pointless to waste any more Russian blood there. The occupation of the city had begun in March.
According to Belousov, more than 7,700 of the more than 50,000 reports of war crimes filed with the Ukrainian authorities have come from the Kherson region. He went on to say that the region still has more than 540 missing civilians. According to Kovalenko, the regional prosecutor, some people, including children, have apparently been deported to Russian-held territory.
According to Belousov, authorities have discovered more than 80 bodies, the majority of which were civilians. More than 50 of those bodies had been killed by gunshots or artillery fire. In addition, hundreds of civilian bodies had been discovered in other areas where Russian forces had left, Belousov said. This includes over 800 civilians in the Kharkiv region, where investigators have had more time to investigate since Ukraine retook a large portion of its territory in September.
According to a Facebook (NASDAQ:) report from January 2, Ukrainian authorities have also identified 25 locations in the Kharkiv region that they have referred to as “torture camps.” post by Volodymyr Tymoshko, the regional police chief of Kharkiv.
If they are deemed to be sufficiently grave, some of the thousands of alleged war crimes committed by Russian forces could be taken to international tribunals. An investigation into alleged war crimes in Ukraine has been launched by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Hague.
According to British attorney Nigel Povoas, lead prosecutor of a Western-backed team of legal specialists assisting Kyiv’s efforts to prosecute war crimes, the numbers that are emerging on the scale of alleged detentions and torture “point to widespread and grave criminality in Russian-occupied territory.”
Povoas stated that “the impression of a wider, criminal policy, emanating from the leadership” to target the country’s civilian population is reinforced by the fact that there appears to have been a pattern of causing terror and suffering throughout Ukraine.
One 35-year-old Kherson city resident claimed that Russian authorities beat him, stripped him naked, and shocked his ears and genitals with electric shocks during his five-day detention in August. The man, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation, described the impact of the current as “like a ball flying into your head and you pass out.”
He claimed that his captors suspected him of being connected to the resistance movement, so they questioned him about Ukraine’s military efforts, including the storage of weapons and explosives. Despite not being a member of the Ukrainian military or territorial defense forces, Andriy told Reuters that he knew people who did.
According to Ukrainian authorities, an office building in the city of Kherson was one of the largest regional detention facilities. They claim that just one of the rooms in the basement, which resembled a labyrinth, was used to detain and torture more than 30 individuals during the Russian occupation. Authorities stated that an investigation to determine the total number of people in custody is ongoing.
During a December visit to the basement, the smell of human feces permeated the air, windows that had been bricked up blocked the light, and lying there were signs of what Ukrainian authorities claim were Russian forces’ tools of torture, such as metal pipes, plastic ligatures for ties, and a wire that was allegedly used to give electric shocks. Notches and messages were scratched into the wall, which authorities claimed were made by detainees possibly to count the number of days held. One said, ” I live for her.
According to Ukrainian authorities and more than a dozen Kherson residents Reuters spoke with, a police building that locals have referred to as “the hole” was another location in the city where people were allegedly interrogated and tortured.
Liudmyla Shumkova, 47, claimed that she and her sister, 53, were held hostage at the location on No. 3 Energy Workers’ Street, for the majority of their more than fifty summer days in detention. She claimed that the Russians inquired about her sister’s son because they were concerned that he might be a part of the resistance movement.
According to Shumkova, a health law attorney, about a dozen people were crammed into a cell with only a small window for light and as little food as one meal per day. She claimed that while fellow detainees, including a female police officer with whom she shared a cell, were subjected to physical torture, she was not. She stated that men endured particularly severe torture. Every day, they screamed incessantly. It might last for two or three hours.
The alleged war crimes are still being sought out by investigators, with the possibility of senior military leadership playing a role. The war crimes chief, Belousov, stated that over 70 individuals had been identified as suspects and 30 individuals had been indicted when asked if authorities had initiated criminal proceedings against alleged torturers.
“Senior officers, in particular colonels and lieutenant colonels” and senior figures in pro-Russian Luhansk and Donetsk military-civilian administrations are among the suspects, according to Belousov, who did not name the individuals. When asked whether their forces were involved in illegal detentions or torture, representatives of the pro-Russian Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic did not respond.
Concerning the alleged perpetrators, neither the Russian defense ministry nor the Kremlin responded to questions.
War crimes investigators examined a courthouse that Ukrainian authorities claim Russian forces used to detain and torture individuals, as well as a nearby school that was converted into a barracks for approximately 300 Russian soldiers, on a cold December day in the village of Bilozerka in the Kherson region. There were gas masks, medical kits, Russian literature, and bullets fired into a brick wall in the now deserted school building, whose walls were painted with the “Z” symbol, which has become an emblem of support for Russia in the war.
A small group of investigators examined fingerprints and collected DNA samples at the courthouse. In order to identify the evidence, they had placed numbered yellow markers in a garage adjacent. Two prosecutors said the gas mask, which was attached to a tube and pouch for liquid, resembled improvised torture devices that were allegedly used by occupying Russians to create the impression of drowning. Additionally, a desk chair that had been turned over had plastic ties scattered nearby.
When questioned about the alleged methods of torture, neither the Russian defense ministry nor the Kremlin responded.
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