Russian ‘torture rooms’ discovered in Kherson
UKRAINIAN authorities were yesterday investigating sites where torture allegedly took place in the city of Kherson.
More than two weeks after Russian forces retreated, investigators say five torture rooms have been found in the Ukrainian city and at least four more in the wider Kherson province.
Ukrainians allege that they were confined, beaten, given electric shocks, interrogated and threatened with death. Human rights experts warn that the allegations made so far are only the beginning of the inquiry.
When a dozen Russian soldiers stormed into Dmytro Bilyi’s house in August, the 24-year-old police officer said they gave him a chilling choice – hand in his pistol or his mother and brother would disappear.
He turned his gun over to the soldiers, who carried machine guns and had their faces concealed, but they nevertheless dragged him from his home in the village of Chornobaivka to a prison in the nearby city of Kherson, where he said he was locked in a cell and tortured for days. “It was like hell all over my body,” he recalled. “It burns so bad, it’s like the blood is boiling.”
More than two weeks after Russians retreated from the city, accounts such as Mr Bilyi’s are helping to uncover sites where torture allegedly took place in Kherson, which Kremlin forces occupied for eight months.
Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Centre for Civil Liberties, a rights group in Ukraine, said: “For months we’ve received information about torture and other kind of persecution of civilians. I am afraid that horrible findings in Kherson still lie ahead.”
The Associated Press spoke with five people who allege they were tortured or arbitrarily detained by Russians in Kherson or knew of others who disappeared and endured abuse. Sometimes, they said, the Russians rounded up whoever they saw for no specific reason. In other cases, Russians were allegedly tipped off by sympathisers who provided names of people believed to be helping the Ukrainian military.
Once detained, the people said they were locked in crowded cells, fed meagre portions of watery soup and bread, and made to learn the Russian national anthem while listening to screams from prisoners being tortured across the corridor.
Detainees were allegedly forced to give information about relatives or acquaintances with ties to the Ukrainian army, including names and locations disclosed in handwritten notes.
Ukrainian national police allege that more than 460 war crimes have been committed by Russian soldiers in recently occupied areas of Kherson. The torture in the city is said to have occurred in two police stations, one police-run detention centre, a prison and a private medical facility, where rubber batons, baseball bats and a machine used for applying electrical shocks were found, said Andrii Kovanyi, a press officer for the police in Kherson.
Documenting the crimes in Kherson will be challenging because no other city as large has been occupied by Russia for so long, said Brian Castner, senior crisis adviser at Amnesty International.
“Evidence must be collected and preserved to maintain that chain of custody, so that when there is international justice, the evidence is locktight and perpetrators can be held to account,” he said.