Deep in the basement of the police headquarters in Kherson, occupying Russian soldiers ran an interrogation operation, according to Ukrainian officers returning to the liberated city.
A shooting range was converted into a torture area where Putin’s forces would blindfold people and beat them so hard they could barely walk. Some of those who went in did not come out again.
Police say they have also discovered a mass grave containing the corpses of the Ukrainian territorial defence who were killed at the start of the invasion while trying to halt Russia’s advance.
As in so many recently-liberated towns in Ukraine, identifying the dead and missing will be a grim task in the coming weeks.
“We don’t know how many have been killed or disappeared, everyday people come to us looking for their missing relative and friend,” said Dennis Zaharchenko, assistant to the chief of the Kherson police department, as shelling boomed in the background.
“In one park, we found 17 bodies of territorial defence, they are part of those who tried to defend the city and were killed at the very beginning of the invasion.”
The Independent was not permitted to enter the police building because it is heavily mined and probably booby-trapped, but residents spoke of relatives and friends vanishing into the police station after being taken from their homes. Those that did return came back physically and mentally broken, they said.
And so, as Kherson reopens after eight months of occupation, a picture is emerging of a city subjected to what has apparently become Russia’s bloody playbook.
Residents gathered in the main square on Monday waving Ukrainian flags signed by soldiers and singing the national anthem, to greet president Volodymyr Zelensky who made a surprise trip from Kyiv.
Kherson was the last regional centre that Moscow had held onto since the February invasion. But alongside the celebrations over its recapture, stories were emerging about life under Russian rule.
The Kremlin has vehemently denied committing any crimes in Ukraine, and has accused Kyiv of staging atrocities to win support.
But residents of Kherson described Russia’s forces making lists of any current soldiers or veterans, police officers and officials and systematically combing the city for them – actions repeated in other occupied regions of Ukraine including Kyiv and Kharkiv.
They also jailed humanitarian volunteers, accusing them of collaborating with the Ukrainian military and giving away their positions. They rounded up people who refused to vote in September’s sham referendum on annexation; residents describe heavily armed soldiers in packs going house to house demanding people cast their ballot.
“People were trying to hide from the referendum but for us four soldiers with guns turned up at our door with a ballot box, so what can you do?” said Yuriy, 38, who was celebrating the Russian retreat with his seven-year-old daughter in Kherson’s central square.
He described how he spent the last eight months effectively in hiding as soldiers were hunting for him because of his former job as a police officer.
Ukrainians in newly-liberated Kherson’s central square celebrate their freedom from Russian occupation
“The only reason I’m OK is because I am formally registered as living in a village in the Kherson region but I had moved into the city before the war.”
“Soldiers were in my village asking about me,” he continued. “Friends were not so lucky.
In front of me, the soldiers took my neighbour. That was in June and still nobody knows where she is. All we can hope is that she is still alive and in prison somewhere.”
Similar stories were repeated throughout the city, which was freed from Russian forces on Friday and is still being shelled from Russian positions located just across the Dnipro river – which marks the city boundary and cuts the wider region in half.
A girl waves a Ukrainian flag in celebration after months of Russian occupation
The police headquarters which officers say was used by occupying forces as a place for torture
