‘The worst thing was hearing the screams of people in other cells’
Citizens in Kherson recall torture at hands of Russian troops as Kyiv investigates at least 63 civilian deaths
Until nine months ago, the only people likely to end up in Kherson’s Teploenerhetykiv Street police station were thieves and drunks. When Russian troops arrived, however, anyone suspected of disliking the city’s new rulers could find themselves dragged there.
Technically, that meant nearly everyone in Kherson – although, in practice, it was people such as Maxim, who was on a list of former Ukrainian troops the Russians found. For the crime of serving his country, he was interrogated for three weeks, beaten and tortured with electric shocks.
“They arrested ex-soldiers like me, but they also took anyone suspected of being pro-ukrainian nationalists,” he said. “They tortured us because they thought we were passing information about Russian troop movements to the Ukrainian military.”
At one point, Maxim was taken to the police station basement and had a bag placed over his head, crocodile clips attached to his ears, and a powerful electric current applied.
He declined to elaborate on how painful it had been, but claimed other aspects of his ordeal had been even harder.
“The worst thing was hearing the screams and suffering of people in other cells,” he said. “Our captors were partly just following orders, but also seemed to be acting out of hatred.”
Maxim, who was released in late March having spent his 45th birthday in jail, returned to Teploenerhetykiv Street yesterday to give reporters an account of the horrors he had witnessed there.
Meanwhile, Ukraine said it had discovered at least 63 bodies of civilians who were reportedly tortured and killed by Russian forces in the Kherson region.
“Investigators are examining them and recording every case of torture, discovering evidence as well as exhuming bodies of the deceased,” said Denys Monastyrsky, the interior minister.
He warned, however, that the work to uncover suspected Russian crimes had only just begun.
“We are likely to find more places of torture and more places of burial for the victims,” Mr Monastyrsky said.
Ukrainian police had so far uncovered at least 11 illegal prisons in Kherson, including four locations where inmates were tortured, he added. The police station in
Teploenerhetykiv Street is among those now being treated as a crime scene by Ukrainian prosecutors, who arrived after Russian troops withdrew from Kherson last week.
In some of the building’s litterstrewn cells, they were said to have found chairs with metal shackles attached, and a device with a dial like an old-fashioned telephone that dispensed electric shocks.
In the station’s outbuildings, Russian graffiti declared: “President Zelensky, we are coming.” A framed photograph of Vladimir Putin that had hung on a wall lay smashed on the ground.
Maxim was lucky, by all accounts, to have survived to tell his story.
Volodymyr Kaluga, Kherson’s senior prosecutor, said that investigations had been opened into 869 cases in which people had been detained and tortured. So far, however, only 480 of the alleged victims had been found.
Asked if he knew what had happened to the rest, he replied: “Unfortunately not.”
Meri Akopyan, a deputy interior minister who visited the police station yesterday, said that community leaders and officials were among those still unaccounted for. “We don’t know whether these missing people have been killed, taken to Russia, or simply not tracked down yet,” she said.
The first major Ukrainian city to fall into Russian hands, Kherson has been readjusting to life back in Kyiv’s control since last Friday, when the Kremlin withdrew its 30,000 troops to the east side of the Dnipro river.
The city has been left in a state of ruin, with most businesses either shut, looted or war-damaged. Homes are cut off from electricity, gas and water supplies.
The city yesterday honoured those who had tried to defend it. At a wooded municipal park in a suburb, a memorial on a bullet-scarred tree marked the spot where 17 members of a territorial defence unit were killed as a Russian armoured column invaded on March 1.
Their bodies were left there for two days until a priest retrieved them for burial.