‘Every second felt like eternity’: Inside the torture chambers of Ukraine’s occupied north-east

At night, when the street outside was quiet, Olga would hear the screams of women being gang-raped by Russian soldiers in the interrogation room one floor above her tiny squalid cell.

Together with her fellow female inmates, sleeping stacked side-by-side like cutlery in a drawer, she would try to block out the terrifying sound.

But the sharp barks of the Chechens spurring each other on, punched through the cries.

“I could hear them shouting ‘come on, you have a go next’,” says the 50-year-old call centre operator at her hometown’s fire department.

“They threatened all of us with rape during the day but the torture and violence always took place at night.  Because the street outside was quiet and our cell was under the torture room, we heard it all,” she adds her voice shrinking into a pause.

Together with her husband, a 57-year-old businessman, she was held by Russian soldiers in the police station at Balakiya, a town in the northeastern region of Kharkiv, which before the war was home to an important railroad junction.

Moscow’s men captured the town and the surrounding Izyum district at the start of March shortly after President Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine. They held onto it for six months until a counteroffensive forced them to withdraw in September.

Like many towns The Independent has visited across recently liberated territory in the north-east and south of the country, the soldiers quickly took over the town’s main police department and other key administrative buildings.

They filled holding cells and basements they partitioned off using stacked ammunition boxes, with anyone they deemed to be a threat: from family members of soldiers in the Ukrainian military to those accused of simply being pro-Ukrainian. Dozens of testimonies recount similar grim tales of  torture, arbitrary detention, rape, enforced disappearance, forcible transfer to Russia, and summary executions. All are potential war crimes and all were rife.

The Russian authorities have repeatedly and vehemently denied committing any crimes in Ukraine. The Kremlin has accused Ukraine of deliberately staging atrocities to win international support.But the Kharkiv regional prosecutor’s office said that in the recently liberated areas alone they have uncovered 623 bodies of dead civilians and were investigating more than 8,200 suspected crimes including allegations of torture and murder.

They are also trying to find hundreds of missing people: since the war the Kharkiv regional police had received nearly 1100 reports of missing people, around a third of which have been found. Thousands more are missing country wide.

And the abuse in Izyum, in particular, was so routine Human Rights Watch concluded “this treatment was part of a policy and plan”. HRW interviewed 100 people in the city, the regional capital located about 120km (75 miles)  from Kharkiv . There, survivors described being subjected to waterboarding, severe beatings, sexual violence and threats at gunpoint. They echo testimonies gathered by The Independent, where people also told of soldiers threatening detainees by putting guns in their mouths and medicine being withheld.

But the worst torture was electrocution.

Oleksander, 49, a veteran firefighter in Balakiya who worked with Olga, was accused of informing the Ukrainian military about Russian positions and also detained in the police station.

Both Oleksander and Olga believe they were arrested because of pro-Russian co-workers at the fire department who informed on them, as Russian soldiers mobilised sympathetic inhabitants to spy on locals.

Oleksander says he was so badly tortured with electricity he could no longer stand after interrogation sessions and had to be dragged limp to his tiny cell by two soldiers.

“When they brought us to the police station they put bags on our heads and they told us ‘you can forget that you are alive, no one will find you again’,” the father-of-three says.

“Then they started the electrocution. They connected this device to your fingers and your legs and other parts of your body.”

“It’s hard to explain how painful it is, you lose complete control and just go into spasms,” he adds. He said the pain was so intense “every second felt like eternity”.

Xural.com