Ukrainian prisoners describe ‘torture facilities’ used by Russian interrogators
Global News
The accounts of Ukrainians held by Russians in occupied Balakliya are the latest evidence the forces of President Vladimir Putin routinely used torture.
BALAKLIYA, Ukraine — On Aug. 3, Russian soldiers came to Oleksander Loboda’s fire station, put a bag over his head and took him and three co-workers away in handcuffs.
“They told us to forget that we have a life, that we no longer exist, that our life is over,” said the resident of Balakliya, one of a swath of towns recently wrested from Russian control.
During three interrogation sessions, Loboda said he was beaten with a plastic baton and shocked with electricity as the occupiers accused him of passing information to the Ukrainian military.
The three-storey police building in the centre of Balakliya was the site of one of more than 20 alleged torture facilities identified since Russian forces were pushed out of Ukraine’s eastern Kharkiv region.
Russian forces used the sites to hold those they thought were linked to the police and military, said Dmytro Shevchuk, deputy of the Department of Investigation of Crimes Committed in Armed Conflict.
“They are civilians, peaceful citizens who just live in the city,” Shevchuk said. He was so shocked by how detainees were treated that he finds it difficult to put it into words, he said.
Ukrainian authorities say the torture facilities have been found across the occupied areas: in cities such as Balakliya, Izyum, and Kupiansk, and in villages such as Kozacha Lopan, Ohirtsi and Lyptsi.
Though the numbers held at the ghastly prisons in Kharkiv region remain unknown, investigators have been interviewing victims as the Ukrainian offensive has made it possible to do so.
