Broken bones, amputated fingers, rape, humiliation, threats of violence and hundreds of lives shattered by such experiences – this is another outcome of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Some 86 percent of Ukrainian soldiers and every other civilian captured or detained by Russian troops and their separatist proxies have been tortured, according to a new human rights report based on 165 interviews with former captives. Those who weren’t tortured said they witnessed others go through the excruciating torment.
“We have war crimes here,” said Oleksandra Matviychuk, the head of the Kyiv-based Center for Civil Rights and a co-author of the report.
Now the center’s activists are preparing to file evidence from their report at the International Criminal Court in The Hague next year, Matviychuk told the Kyiv Post.
Investigation under way
The ICC has already opened a preliminary investigation into the situation in Russia-annexed Crimea and eastern Ukraine based on evidence collected by the human rights groups and prosecutors, she added. If it decides to open a full investigation, “then it will work as an investigative body to find who was guilty of war crimes and hold them to account,” Matviychuk said.
Almost 2,800 Ukrainians had been released from separatist captivity as of Oct. 1, while some 140 people are still in detention, according to the Security Service of Ukraine. The exact numbers of those still held by the separatists or who have died from torture while in captivity is unknown.
Ex-prisoners speak
Former captives find it hard to speak about their experiences. But some did at a news conference in Kyiv on Nov. 27.
Yevhen Shliakhtyn from Stakhanov in Luhansk Oblast recalled how six men armed with Kalashnikovs broke into his house at the end of June 2014 and arrested him for helping Ukrainian soldiers in Luhansk airport. They kept him in a garage, and broke his fingers and wrists. “They would beat me until I lost consciousness,” he said.
Volodymyr Hriban from Chervonoarmiysk in Donetsk Oblast said he was detained at a separatist checkpoint when fighters found clothes and protection gear for Ukrainian soldiers in his car trunk. He was thrown into a dog’s cage and beaten for hours. When he started to faint, a nurse gave him a shot to keep him conscious and in pain.
Oleksandr Hryshchenko said that when he arrived at his office in Luhansk one morning he discovered Russian-backed fighters had carried out a search. Unfortunately, Hryshchenko had a camera with pictures of EuroMaidan Revolution rallies in Kyiv and Luhansk. After finding the photos, the separatists took him to the basement of a local university, which had been converted into a detention center.
‘They beat me up badly’
“They beat me up badly, hit me with a strap, gave me electric shocks and used a surgical saw on me,” he said.
Hryshchenko, who spent six months in captivity, said the separatists could arbitrarily capture any civilian at a checkpoint and accuse them of being an artillery spotter for the Ukrainian army. Any person deemed guilty of this would be tortured to death, he said.
Teenage sex slave
Hryshchenko remembers a man nicknamed Maniac as a vicious torturer. The man who looked after the prison was a Russian citizen nicknamed Luish. Hryshchenko also said captured women were often sexually abused. He said a 15-year-old girl had been sent to the war front as a sex slave for the fighters.
Information from interviews with former captives allowed the Center for Civil Rights report authors to identify 79 current and former detention centers in Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts. “Half of the people were kept in basements there. Some of them were also kept in garages or in sewage drains” said Yury Belousov, a representative for Ukraine’s ombudswoman Valeriya Lutkovska and co-author of the report.
Forced labor
About half of the captives were also forced to do demanding work, including cleaning cars in which people had been killed, exhuming graves or clearing mines, the report said.
Russian nationals and regular soldiers from the Russian army were often involved in torturing Ukrainian captives, according to the report.
Ukrainian military prosecutors are collecting evidence of war crimes committed by Russian soldiers, said Andriy Khomenko, a representative for military prosecutors. Seven Russians have already been sentenced in absentia by the Ukrainian courts, he added. “We will hold these people to account when we detain them,” Khomenko said.
The report also found that Ukrainian forces, including fighters from the Aidar and Tornado volunteer battalions, also have been accused of kidnapping people. These cases are now being investigated.
The Kyiv Post saw people detained by the Aidar Battalion in Luhansk Oblast in 2014, and heard reports of torture being practiced by the now disbanded Tornado Battalion. These cases, however, were on a lesser scale than the abuses carried out by Russians and separatists.
Motorola executions
In April, the commander of one Russian-backed armed group, Russian citizen Arseniy Pavlov, nicknamed Motorola, told the Kyiv Post that he had personally executed several Ukrainian prisoners of war.
Pavlov was also named in a recently published report entitled “War Crimes in Eastern Ukraine 2014,” which was commissioned by Polish member of parliament Małgorzata Gosiewska and investigated by Polish police detectives and Ukrainian volunteers. Based on evidence from former captives, the 155-page report accuses Donetsk separatist leaders including Alexander Zakharchenko, Mikhail Tolstykh (nicknamed Givi), and Russian citizen Igor Girkin (nicknamed Strelkov) of war crimes. Gosiewska’s report is also being prepared for filing at the ICC in The Hague.
Jurisdiction
Although Ukraine has yet to ratify the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the ICC, Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin submitted a declaration to the international body in September granting the court jurisdiction over crimes on Ukrainian territory since February 2014.
Jan Pieklo, the director of Polish-Ukrainian Cooperation Foundation, who helped prepare Gosiewska’s report, said Putin could be brought to justice for war crimes, just like former Serb leaders after the Balkans War. “When there was war in the former Yugoslavia, nobody at that time seriously thought that one day Slobodan Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic would be brought to justice. But it happened. So it’s just a question of time,” Pieklo said.
Kyiv Post editor Allison Quinn contributed to the story.
