Ukrainian prisoners of war say they were tortured at Russian prison

17.08.2023, 02:41 bbc.co.uk

Former Ukrainian captives say they were subjected to torture, including frequent beatings and electric shocks, while in custody at a detention facility in south-western Russia, in what would be serious violations of international humanitarian law.

In interviews with the BBC, a dozen ex-detainees released in prisoner exchanges alleged physical and psychological abuse by Russian officers and guards at the Pre-Trial Detention Facility Number Two, in the city of Taganrog.

The testimonies, gathered during a weeks-long investigation, describe a consistent pattern of extreme violence and ill-treatment at the facility, one of the locations where Ukrainian prisoners of war have been held in Russia.

Their allegations include:

The BBC has been unable to independently verify the claims, but details of the accounts were shared with human rights groups and, when possible, corroborated by other detainees.

The Russian government has not allowed any outside bodies, including the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, to visit the facility which before the war was used exclusively to hold Russian prisoners.

Russia's defence ministry did not respond to several requests to comment on the allegations. It has previously denied torturing or mistreating captives.

The prisoner swaps between Ukraine and Russia are a rare diplomatic achievement in the war and more than 2,500 Ukrainians have been released since the start of the conflict. Up to 10,000 captives are believed to remain in Russian custody, according to human rights groups.

Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine's human rights ombudsman and one of the officials involved in exchange negotiations with Moscow, said nine in every 10 former detainees claimed they had been tortured while in Russian captivity. "This is the biggest challenge for me now: how to protect our people on the Russian side," Lubinets said. "Nobody knows how we can do it."

Last September, Artem Seredniak, a senior lieutenant, had already been in Russian captivity for four months when he and about 50 other Ukrainians were transferred to Pre-Trial Detention Facility Number Two. They travelled in the back of a truck for hours, without knowing where they were going, blindfolded and tied to each other by their arms, like a "human centipede", Seredniak told me.

On their arrival in Taganrog, he recalled, an officer greeted them: "Hello boys. Do you know where you are? You'll rot here until the end of your lives." The captives remained silent. They were escorted inside the building, Seredniak said, had their fingerprints taken and clothes removed, were shaven and forced to shower.

At every step, guards at the facility, who carried black batons and metal bars, beat them in the legs, arms, or "anywhere they wanted", Seredniak said. "It's what they call 'reception'."

Before his capture, Seredniak, who is 27, headed a sniper platoon at the Azov Regiment, the main military force in Mariupol. This, he said, made him a key target for the prison staff. Seredniak said he was separated from the others and, dressed only in his underwear, brought to a room to be interrogated for the first time. He was then pushed to the floor, he said, with his head facing down.

The guards asked him about his role in the army and the tasks he had carried out. With an electric stun weapon, they gave him shocks, Seredniak said, in his back, groin and neck.

"That's how they worked on everybody," he said. "They hammered you like a nail."

In May last year, as Mariupol was under a Russian siege, the Ukrainian authorities ordered hundreds of soldiers holed up in the city's Azovstal steelworks to surrender. Seredniak was among the last to be evacuated. He was first taken to a facility in Olenivka, a village in Donetsk, and, months later, sent to the prison in Taganrog, in the Russian border region of Rostov, about 120km (74 miles) east of Mariupol.

There, he told me, the captives were inspected twice a day, and anything appeared to be a motive for guards to abuse them. "They might not have liked how you left the cell, or you weren't quick to get out, or your arms were too low or your head was too high."

In one of those checks, Seredniak was asked whether he had a girlfriend. He said he did, and recalled a guard telling him: "Give us her Instagram. We'll take a picture of you and send it to her." He lied, not wanting to expose her, and said she did not have an account. He was then beaten, he said, and brought to a room in the prison's basement, where he met a twenty-something Ukrainian fighter. Seredniak told me the man was curled, holding his hands, apparently in pain, and said officers had inserted needles under his fingernails.

As the days progressed, Seredniak noticed that the prison guards were particularly brutal with those who belonged to the Azov Regiment, the former militia in Mariupol that once had links to the far right. Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, has said, among other things, that his war is an effort to "de-Nazify" Ukraine - a country led by a Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky - and Russian authorities often cite the unit to justify the invasion.

Seredniak said that, in his interrogations, he was accused of looting Mariupol and of personally telling his forces to kill civilians in the city, the site of one of the most deadly battles in the war so far. Seredniak, who speaks fast with a loud, determined voice, denied the claims, but it did not seem to matter. "Until you said what they were interested in, and in the way they wanted to hear," he told me, "they wouldn't stop beating you."

Once, Seredniak said, an officer used a wooden chair to hit him, and "he beat me so much that it broke in parts". On another day, he said, he was asked whether he could sing the "Azov anthem". He did not know of any Azov anthem, and assumed the guards meant the Prayer of the Ukrainian Nationalist, a 20th-Century oath usually read aloud by soldiers before being sent into combat. Seredniak reluctantly recited it, conscious of how the guards could react.

They punched him several times, he said. He fell, hitting his head against a wall, causing a cut near his eyebrow. He lay on the floor, while the beatings continued, he said, all over his body.

"When I finally got up," Seredniak recalled, "they told me: 'We hope we beat that out of you'."

Some of the prison staff seemed to have been heavily influenced by President Putin's "de-Nazification" narrative. For the detainees, this was apparent in how the guards demonstrated a particular interest in anything that could, in their view, be interpreted as being pro-Nazi. The captives were not allowed to have any personal items, so their tattoos inevitably drew the officers' attention. This reminded me of similar allegations I heard while investigating Russia's filtration camps in occupied areas of Ukraine last year.

Serhii Rotchuk, a 34-year-old senior sergeant at the regiment, also left Azovstal in the final convoys, and was taken to Taganrog a week after Seredniak. He said the guards, at first, "looked for swastikas or things like that". But, in reality, he said, "if you had any tattoo, you were seen as a bad guy". Rotchuk, who is a doctor, has tattoos on both legs, arms and chest. Weeks ago, when we met in Kyiv, he lifted his T-shirt to show me a raven that covered part of his chest and the symbol of an infantry platoon on his left bicep; he also had an emblem of the Jedi Order from Star Wars on his left thigh.

"Did these tattoos cause you any trouble?" I asked him. "Many times," Rotchuk replied. "They would say: 'What's this? Oh, I'll beat you for that'." Seredniak, who has no tattoos, said some fighters who had tattooed nationalist symbols, like the Ukrainian flag or the gold trident, were frequently targeted. "They hated us for being Ukrainian," he told me.

In March, a report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said Russia had "failed to ensure the humane treatment" of prisoners, with "strong patterns of violations".

Kris Janowski, a spokesman for the office, said there was a "long list of bad things that have been done" to the detainees at the facility in Taganrog. The fact that a prison was being used to hold captives was, in itself, a breach of international humanitarian law, he said, as they should be kept in specially designated places. Ukraine also faced some accusations of mistreatment of detainees, according to the March report; but, overall, they were "treated in better fashion".

Rotchuk said the captives "lived in permanent stress" in Taganrog. He recalled meeting a man, also a doctor, who had falsely admitted to removing the testicles of a Russian prisoner, desperate to put an end to the violence. "He said: 'OK, just leave me alone, I will sign the confession.' The officers then intimidated the other medics, saying: 'Ah, you helped him.'"

Guards gave Rotchuk electric shocks, he said, but he resisted. Rotchuk told me he was sent to solitary confinement for two months as punishment. The beatings happened almost every day; sometimes, several times a day, he said.

Rotchuk remembered one officer who appeared to take pleasure in kicking him in the chest, which left him with a persistent pain. He complained, but was given no help. "I had to tell myself: 'Dude, stay strong, you can't control the situation, so you need to accept it,'" Rotchuk recalled.

Not everyone had the same resilience, though. Seredniak said a fellow Azov fighter, in his late 20s, broke a small mirror that hung above his cell's sink, and used a shard to slice his throat. The man was rescued by other captives, who stopped the bleeding with their hands. Days later, Seredniak said, the prison staff removed the mirrors from all cells.

Russian doctors, Seredniak said, would occasionally visit the detainees, but "didn't necessarily help" them. He described the food portions they were given as limited; sometimes, he said, they were "so small, that if I ate 300-400 calories a day, I was