Ukrainian prisoners recount torture, sexual abuse while in Russian detention

Aug 10 - Former Ukrainian detainees and Ukrainian officials accused Russia on Monday of systematically torturing prisoners of war and civilian detainees, holding captives incommunicado and subjecting them to beatings, electric shocks and sexual abuse, with thousands still in captivity.

Russia rejected the allegations made at an informal U.N. Security Council meeting, with its Deputy U.N. Representative Maria Zabolotskaya calling it “a disinformation campaign” and alleging that Russian prisoners in Ukraine were subjected to “torture and degradation and moral and physical abuse.”

Khuan Alberto Levya Garsiya, still an active member of the Ukrainian military, said his Russian captors subjected him to every imaginable form of torture during 1,183 days in captivity.

"Yes ... I was tortured," he told reporters after the U.N. meeting. "Anything you can think of that can be done hurtful, humiliating to a man, unwillingly. Anything that comes to your mind, not only verbal, physical abuse, daily beatings, electrocution, excessive, excessive exercises in freezing cold when it's minus degrees ... sexual abuse. Everything that can be applied to a person into making a person break mentally. It was all applied to me and most of my comrades."

Garsiya said he was lucky to survive but two of his friends were beaten to death in detention centers in the Donetsk region. Prisoners were held in “overcrowded barracks without adequate conditions,” where “almost all POWs were ill with dysentery” and many were starving, he told the U.N. meeting.

A Ukrainian with a Cuban father, he said guards targeted him particularly because of his Latino name, accusing him of being "a mercenary and an American spy.”

Crimean Tatar activist Leniie Umerova, released in a prisoner exchange in 2024, said she was detained while trying to visit her seriously ill father in Crimea.

She described being moved through “seven detention facilities” in what she called “a carousel of repression” and accused Russia of using torture against Ukrainians in captivity.

Oleg Gushin of the Ukrainian government's Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War said Ukrainian prisoners were “killed and tortured” in detention.

He said Kyiv had identified “more than 300 places of detention” in Russia and occupied Ukrainian territory and that while more than 9,000 Ukrainians had been returned through exchanges, “thousands” remained in Russian captivity.

Ukraine's Chargé d'Affaires Volodymyr Pavlichenko called for greater international pressure and accountability for Russia's treatment of prisoners.

"WIDESPREAD AND SYSTEMATIC"

U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Claudia Fuentes Julio said U.N. monitoring showed that "widespread and systematic torture and ill-treatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilian detainees by the Russian Federation authorities continues,” including sexual violence.

Since February 2022, the U.N. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights had documented the execution of 129 Ukrainian prisoners of war at the beginning of their captivity and the deaths of 48 in custody, resulting from torture, denial of medical care, or other inhumane conditions of detention, she said.

She said more than 95% of Ukrainian prisoners of war interviewed reported experiencing torture or ill-treatment.

She said more than half also reported sexual violence, including "rape, gang rape, beating while nude, beatings to the genitals, electric shocks to the genitals and nipples, and degrading treatment of a sexualized nature."

She said the U.N. had received "consistent accounts of severe beatings with objects such as batons, heavy belts, and wood, electric shocks, dog attacks, mock executions, and other forms of torture."

Fuentes Julio said the OHCHR had also documented torture and ill-treatment of Russian and third-country national prisoners of war held by Ukraine, but "on a fundamentally different scale.”

She said about half of Russian and third-country prisoners interviewed reported abuse during initial stages of captivity. REUTERS