Revealed, horrors of ‘torture chamber’ the Russians abandoned
UKRAINIAN war crimes prosecutors have released images and details of a Russian ‘torture chamber’ they found in a newly liberated village.
Officials said the grim basement in Kozacha Lopan, in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, was where Russian forces tormented military and civilian prisoners.
One image showed a Sovietera military telephone which they claimed was used as the power source for a yellow wire which was connected to metal clips to electrocute prisoners during interrogation.
The basement also had a room with prison-style bars.
In recent days, testimonies have emerged from Ukrainians saying they were electrocuted, burned and beaten by Russian soldiers demanding the names and addresses of senior military figures in the region.
The Kremlin troops who were occupying Kharkiv, in the northeast of the country, have
‘Beaten with iron pipes’
dropped their weapons and fled in the last couple of weeks after Ukraine’s counteroffensive.
The attack has rapidly retaken over 3,000 square miles of territory that was lost to Vladimir Putin’s forces earlier this year.
But the Ukrainian soldiers’ joy quickly turned to grief as they uncovered evidence of Russian war crimes. Prosecutors have documented the atrocities, which included torture chambers as well as mass graves.
They have so far exhumed more than 60 bodies – of both soldiers and civilians – from a burial site thought to contain at least 450 graves in a forest on the edge of Izyum in Kharkiv.
Some bodies showed signs of torture, with their hands tied behind their backs and ropes around their necks, it was claimed. Others revealed injuries consistent with rocket or shelling attacks.
President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of genocide in his TV address on Saturday and said it will answer for its crimes ‘both on the battlefield and in the courtroom’. He added: ‘More than ten torture chambers have already been found in the liberated areas in Kharkiv.’
And a resident of nearby Kupyansk gave a horrifying account of the torture methods allegedly used on him. He said he was electrocuted for 40 minutes, adding: ‘They shot me either with a pneumatic gun or a gas gun, I don’t know – I was in a bag. [People] were beaten with bats or iron pipes.’
The EU has called for an international war crimes tribunal to be set up to probe Russia’s actions during its seven-month invasion. Following its hasty retreat on the battlefield, Russia has escalated its shelling of Ukrainian towns and cities from within its own borders.
Several deaths, including those of four doctors and a nineyearold girl, were reported in the Kharkiv region. The UK’s Ministry of Defence yesterday said Russia was ‘prepared to strike in an attempt to undermine the morale of the Ukrainian people and government’.