Horrors of Putin’s torturers revealed in new report: Female Ukrainian soldier was raped for three days straight and a prisoner due for execution after begging for death was told he had not ‘seen all seven circles of hell yet’
-Dignity reported the fates suffered by Ukrainians held prisoner by Putin’s troops
-Over 700 instances of torture and human rights violations were documented
Daily Mail
Chris Pleasance
04:29 EDT, 13 May 2023 | Updated: 07:18 EDT, 13 May 2023
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12071573/Horrors-Putins-torturers-revealed-new-report-Ukraine.html
Burned with hot irons, choked with gas masks, beaten so badly they suffered heart attacks, and forced to lie in the blood of an executed cellmate.
These may sound like scenes from a horror movie, but in fact, they are the very real fates suffered by Ukrainians held prisoner by Russian troops in occupied areas of the country.
They are among 725 cases of torture, ill treatment, summary execution, and other human rights violations documented by Dignity, a Danish anti-torture group, in a new report.
In one case, a prisoner and armed forces veteran told how he was tortured so badly he begged for death - but was kept alive by his tormentors who bragged ‘you haven’t seen the full seven circles of hell yet!’
In another, a detainee recalled being forced to listen to a female Ukrainian soldier being raped for three days straight before she was dragged away and never heard from again.
Therese Rytter, legal director of Dignity, said the use of torture by Russian troops was widespread, systematic, and ‘may thus amount to crimes against humanity’.
For its report, Dignity interviewed 121 victims of Russian abuse, including in official detention centres such as prisons and police stations, and unofficial detention centres such as school basements, houses, and government buildings.
READ MORE: On the run: Putin’s forces flee Bakhmut ‘in bad order’
They found the use of torture by Russian forces was a matter of routine, used against members of the military, police or government officials to force them to collaborate or as revenge, and against civilians to intimidate them or to extract information.
In one of the most extreme cases, a man who served as a military volunteer in Mariupol before he was captured told how Russians kidnapped him from his jail cell and held him for five months during which he was tortured - sometimes for days on end.
The man recalled being bound, gagged, beaten, strangled with electrical wire until he passed out, then doused in water to wake him up only so the torment could start over again.
He said: ‘On the third day, I asked my tormentors … [to] finish me off, because I didn’t have anything to tell them.
‘[One of the torturers] called one of his supervisors [and] showed me to him through the phone. The one on the phone just nodded and said nothing.’
The man expected to be killed, but his jailors ignored the order and carried on abusing him.
‘They kept torturing me,’ he said. ‘My hands were turned back and shackled. I was laid on the floor face down, strangled with wire from the extension cable.
‘When I started to lose consciousness, they said: “Wait. It’s too early. You haven’t gone through all seven circles of hell yet”.’
Another, kept in a prison colony in Zaporizhzhia, told investigators: ‘I heard a female soldier being raped. This lasted for about three days.
‘Then I couldn’t hear her anymore and I don’t know what happened with her.’
In the opening days of Putin’s war, Russian troops took control of 11 jails, 100 police stations, and dozens of secure psychiatric hospitals across swathes of Ukraine.
But, since the despot expected to conquer the entire nation within hours, there was no plan to deal with the thousands of people locked up in these places.
Inmates told how they were ignored for weeks even as food and medicines ran low, but in late April and early May the Russians arrived and things went from bad to worse.
Prisoners in one jail in occupied Kherson told how the arriving guards ordered everyone to get on the floor but shot one inmate in the head through a window before he could comply.
Those in the cell recalled how their new captors forced them to remain laying in the man’s blood for six hours alongside his corpse before forcing them to clean up pieces of his skull and brains with their bare hands.
One said: ‘That day, at lunchtime, Russian soldiers came to our [prison]... The military threw grenades, fired machine guns. They ordered us not to look out of the window.
‘One prisoner was killed through a window from outside. His corpse remained in the cell one more day, and everyone who was in that cell was forced to stay there.’
Another said: ‘Two pieces of skull were on the floor. Everything around was covered in blood and brain. Everyone got on the floor, we laid there until about six o’clock in the evening, lying on the floor, all in blood.
‘I cleaned the brains and a piece of the back side of the skull from the floor with my own hands.’
Once the Russians had established their authority, they used routine beatings as a means of keeping control - with a common method being to line people up facing a wall with their arms and legs spread before striking their back with batons.
An inmate at the same Kherson jail where the man was shot recalled being beaten so badly that he ‘had blood in my urine for a month and a half’.
Gusein Abdullaiev, a foreign student held in Mariupol, said he witnessed a man who suffered a heart attack during one beating - and when he tried to help the man ‘I was beaten even harder.’
A prisoner at a different Kherson jail said simply: ‘They beat us for everything and for nothing.’
As the war dragged on Russian forces began detaining Ukrainians themselves, ranging from alleged members of the armed forces to civilians and community leaders.
[I must excerpt article too difficult. Go to link for article and photographs]