“They kept the torture room open so we could hear the screams”. Ukrainian man describes forced confessions as nine Kherson residents face trial in Russia

I was detained on August 5, 2022, at 8 pm in the village of Skelky, Vasylivka district, Zaporizhzhia region, where my Red Cross colleagues and I had stopped for the night.

Two men arrived in military uniforms with no insignia, armed with an assault rifle. They were in a white Renault Duster with Ukrainian number plates; I don’t recall the number.

They didn’t identify themselves. After checking our documents, they ordered me to gather my things and get into my car, a white 2008 Mercedes Benz. They told Oleg Akimchenko, my manager at the Red Cross, to get into their Renault Duster, saying they were taking us “to the pit”.

A man with an assault rifle sat next to me. He told me to follow the Renault. We were taken to the town of Vasylivka, Zaporizhzhia region, to the SIZO building. They immediately confiscated our phones and personal belongings and began searching my car. At the time, the vehicle contained the luggage of people who had fled the occupied part of Ukraine; we were transporting them to Ukrainian-controlled territory. There was also medical equipment in the car: meant for endoscopic surgery, as far as I know. In my wallet, I had 11,000 hryvnias, $200, €3,000, and bank cards. In a red canvas backpack behind the seat, there was 70,000 hryvnias. They seized all of it, no confiscation record was drawn up, and I was given nothing to sign.

After the search, we were taken to separate cells in the basement of the detention centre. We were fed dinner and left until morning. In the morning, they took us out, put plastic bags over our heads, taped them round our necks, and bound our hands behind our backs with cable ties.

They put us in the back of my car—from their conversation, I gathered we were being taken to Melitopol. When we arrived, they led us out of the car into an administrative building where there were many soldiers, which I could tell by their footwear. They took us into a large room, roughly three by four metres. They stood us facing the wall and told us to wait. Ten minutes later, two men burst in shouting, “What have you done?” and began beating us with sticks on our legs, buttocks, shoulders, and backs, and slamming our heads against the wall. This didn’t last long; it felt like about five minutes.

Then other people entered and said we were going back to Kherson with them and that we had time to think about what to tell them. They put us in the boot of a vehicle that looked like a Gazelle passenger minibus and drove us towards Kherson.

I periodically tried to pull the bag off my head to peek at where we were being taken. Through the rear window, I could see my car with two soldiers driving behind us. We travelled like this for three or four hours. During the journey, the soldiers would look at us from the back seat and strike us on the head with the back of their hands, laughing as they did so, forcing us to press ourselves against plastic petrol canisters and inhale deeply “so they would smell less”.

They brought us to the Port-Elevator [Street], which is in Kherson on the embankment, at the very end of Ushakov Street [avenue]. They left my car there, and two men transferred into our vehicle. We drove up Ushakov Street, turned right onto Kirov Street, and drove into the courtyard of the Ukrainian Ministry of Interior department for the Kherson region. I never saw my car again; it was never returned to my family.

They took me out of the vehicle and led me into the basement: immediately upon entering, there was an open door to the left, and I was led into a small room measuring roughly two by four metres. There were wooden pallets on the floor around the perimeter, a chair in the centre, a desk on the left, and several chairs in a passage to the right. They sat me in the centre; my hands were tied behind my back and strapped to the chair. They put a metal clamp on my finger. Four or five people entered the room and began the interrogation—shouting, sometimes one by one, sometimes all at once, touching my head with a metal object to give me electric shocks.

At such moments, I couldn’t move or speak. I experienced severe muscle pain. They asked questions: where are the weapons caches, where are the explosives, where are the SBU officers, the Territorial Defence, the [Anti-Terrorist Operation] veterans, the hunters? Who doesn’t support the “special military operation”, who goes to Ukrainian rallies? Yet they did not inform me of what I was actually being accused of.

I had hidden four guns at a nearby plot of land, left with me by SBU officers who were fleeing the city. I had promised to show them the spot.

The interrogation in the torture room lasted about 30 minutes. Then they led me out of the basement, put me in the back seat of a car, with men armed with rifles sitting on either side. We drove to the place where I had hidden the guns, Geologov settlement, Selyanskaya Street. When we drove into the settlement, they told me to take the bag off my head and show them the way. Upon arriving at the spot, I dug up the four guns and handed them over.

There were four of them, without balaclavas. One had the call sign “Greek”. When we got into the car, I recognised the voice of the driver—he was the one who had picked me up from Melitopol earlier. He participated in all subsequent interrogations and torture sessions. I believe he was an investigator; everyone called him “Khmury”.

On the way, one of them asked me why we supported the Ukrainian government so much. I said it was out of patriotic feelings, that I couldn’t have acted otherwise. After these words, the one sitting on the right—his call sign was “Tyson”—began punching me in the face and head, shouting that he would teach me to love the motherland.

“Khmury”, who was driving, turned to me and said: “Do you know why they call him Tyson? Because when he served in Syria, he used to bite prisoners’ ears off. He’s with Wagner [mercenary group].”

They put the bag back on my head and took me back to the basement. Going down the stairs, we passed the torture room—the next opening on the left. Two metres from the torture room, there was a metal grille at the entrance which they locked at night, and during the day someone was periodically handcuffed to it. We went down the stairs, and there was a long, damp corridor with poor lighting. There were cells on the right, eight or nine rooms. Each held between three to five people at different times. At the very end of the corridor, there were two large cells holding more people.

The cell doors were old, wooden, reinforced with metal, without locks. They were propped shut from the outside with a piece of pipe. The door had a viewing hole and a hatch for feeding. They led me into a cell—there were cells along the left side of the corridor too, but the doors had been kicked in, and there were piles of rubbish: empty bottles, food packaging, and empty tins of stewed meat they sometimes fed us. It all gave off a disgusting, strong stench of rot.

When they brought me into the cell, they untied my hands and took the bag off my head. They closed the door behind me. The room was about two by five metres, without windows, very poorly lit, with a light that stayed on around the clock but would occasionally go out during shelling, leaving us in complete darkness.

At the far end of the room there was a wooden bunk with several jackets lying on it with the word “Police” [in Ukrainian] written on them. People wrapped themselves in them to sleep.

When I was brought into the cell, I saw someone lying on them who didn’t react to my arrival. I touched his leg to check whether he was alive. Then he turned, and I recognized my colleague, Oleksandr Kraynikh. He had been badly beaten, several ribs broken, and a large hematoma covering his chest and abdomen. He told me he had already been there for several days. That he and Oleksandr Cheruk, my driver-forwarder, had been taken by armed men who burst into my store while they were doing an inventory check. They took 190,000 hryvnias from the safe, brought them to the torture chamber with bags over their heads, interrogated them, and then threw them into the basement.

I later learned that they were beaten and tortured by the same people who interrogated me. About an hour later, we heard screams, and I recognised the voice of my comrade: Denys Lyalka, who was a serviceman in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. According to them, they had been looking for him for a long time. They beat and tortured him for about an hour, and then chained him to the grille, having first beaten the soles of his feet and his knees with sticks. He begged them to let him go, saying he felt unwell and was in pain. He stood like that for a couple of hours until he lost consciousness. The door to our cell was about five or six metres from the grille, and we could hear everything. The acoustics were all too good there: we could always hear who was being tortured, what questions were being asked, and what the soldiers were casually discussing on the street and the floor above us; they kept the torture room open on purpose so we could hear the screams.

They unchained Lyalka and dragged him into a cell one door down from ours, the fifth one along. He sat there for the next two months with Konstantin Reznik and Serhiy Kabakov. They had already been there for a considerable time, probably a month.

The torture itself lasted a week: they took us one by one, sometimes twice a day. They tortured us with electricity, attaching wires to our genitals, beat us with their feet, with sticks on our backs, arms, and feet, poured water over us, covered our mouths and faces with a towel and poured water over it. They did “the monkey”, as they called it: your hands are tied while you clasp your knees, a stick is shoved through the crook of your legs, and the ends of the stick are placed on chairs—so you are hanging on this stick, and it crushes your muscles and tendons.

One of our interrogators was particularly cruel, the youngest of them: 27–30 years old, short, thin, with a dark beard and brown eyes. Call sign “Orel” [Eagle]. He was unable to roll his “R”s and never hid his face. He regularly came in to show us some propaganda.

He loved filming our interrogations on his phone and forcing us to learn the Russian anthem. When he entered the basement, he would play a low-quality recording on his phone, a musical piece titled “Fuck the Nazis”, glorifying the exploits of the Wagner PMC and calling for enlistment in their ranks.

He was also responsible for feeding three of the cells. He fed us pasta with stewed meat, sometimes giving us dry biscuits instead of bread; we didn’t see bread the entire time.

He fed us sometimes once every two days, sometimes once every three days. A few times we got lucky when he wasn’t there; we asked other soldiers, and they brought us food, surprised that we were being tortured like this, but these were isolated incidents. In two months, I lost 25 kg.

Every morning a soldier with the call sign “Voron” [Raven] came. At our request, he allowed us to fill bottles, empty out urine, and go to the toilet to defecate. Voron really loved rock music, played it constantly, and always wore a balaclava.

The tap [with water] was in the middle of the corridor, behind cell number six. There was also a large grille there, to which someone was also constantly handcuffed for five to seven days wearing a hat with “Police” written on it [in Ukrainian]—we all had such hats. When fully unrolled, it reached the chin and completely covered the face. The people chained to the grille were beaten by every soldier who walked past. Some prisoners were brought in, three to five people every day. Some were taken away to unknown destinations.

There were days when Voron wasn’t there, and then we had to stretch our water for another 24 hours and hold it in, because they didn’t take us to the toilet, or we had to defecate into a cut-off five-litre bottle.

When Serhiy Ofitserov was put in with us a couple of days after me (he stayed with us until our arrival at Lefortovo prison), he told us he had spent five days “on the grille” (chained to the grille) without sleep; he had also been tortured and beaten. We scratched our surnames and the dates we arrived on the cell walls, and the guys in the neighbouring cell wrote down the names of everyone brought in and tortured during that time.

There were young girls and women there too; they tortured everyone without exception. For the last two weeks—at the beginning of October 2022—they held an 11-year-old boy in the basement with us in cell No. 7 for allegedly sending target coordinates to the SBU. He cried constantly at night and begged for his mother. Unlike us, he spoke Ukrainian, from which we concluded he was from somewhere in the countryside. I don’t know his fate; he was taken away about a day before our departure to Simferopol.

During this entire time in the basement, journalists, priests, the head of the Right Sector [a Ukrainian nationalist organisation] in Kherson, a history professor, activists, bloggers, the head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations for the city of Oleshky, a prosecutor, and the former head of the Gornostayevka administration, Oleg Ipatov, were brought in—he spent three days with us in the cell around mid-September.

In late August, we were all taken for a polygraph test one by one. There, in a calm atmosphere, we spoke with a psychologist who didn’t hide her face, condemned the methods used against us, and offered psychological help. I took note of it but didn’t use it, as [Orel] was standing outside the door listening.

After the psychologist, the next day they took me home to conduct a search. They allowed me to eat: I found a handful of dumplings in the freezer that my daughter had left for me, and I ate them. All this time, a man of Slavic appearance, aged 50, with a beard and an assault rifle, sat next to me. The others—call signs “Lis” and “Yakut”—conducted the search. My father-in-law’s 2010 Nissan X-Trail was in the yard. The soldiers found the keys to it in my chest of drawers and drove it back to Kirov Street, to the basement. While they were starting it, I went out into the yard to draw the neighbours’ attention to myself—so they would see my back was black with bruises, and that I was actually alive. And it worked—they saw me and understood everything.

They also ordered me to take some clothes. As they put it, “You’ll be felling timber for us in Kolyma in them.” The soldiers said they were taking my father-in-law’s car “for a ride”. They never returned it to us. I saw the soldier nicknamed Yakut driving it. They drew up no documents regarding the seizure of my belongings and gave me nothing to sign.

Around the 20th of August 2022, I was taken to the shower room for the first time: they gave me a razor and soap and told me to tidy myself up. After that, they gave me a T-shirt and shorts I had taken from home. They put me in a minibus and drove me to Nekrasov Street. There, they gave me my black bag—my passport, phone, and Red Cross ID were inside, but my wallet and driving licence were missing. After that, they ordered me to walk along the pavement while they simulated my arrest. They told me that when they pounced on me, I should fall in a way that wouldn’t damage my face because they would be filming it. That is how they supposedly detained me. It worked on the first take.

From around September 20, 2022, the mood among the Russian soldiers was panic-stricken, and they took it out on us. They said they didn’t need us as witnesses and wouldn’t take us with them. They took us one by one into the torture room—and fired into the ceiling, while the others waited their turn “for execution”, standing facing the wall. They came for everyone like that. They also demanded that each of us approach the food hatch in the cell door and present our head. They would thrust a revolver through from the outside and play, as they said, Russian roulette with us—firing at our heads and, when it misfired, telling us we were lucky.

At night, young soldiers aged 19–20 would come down to the basement, usually two to four of them. One had the call sign “Sever”. Very drunk, they ran along the corridor, waking us up, shouting through the doors: “Glory to Ukraine...” And we were supposed to answer: “...as part of the Russian Federation!” They beat those hanging on the grille, randomly took people out of cells, beat them, mocked them, and asked historical questions mostly concerning the Second World War and our patriotic feelings for “the state that doesn’t exist”—that’s what they called Ukraine. Our knowledge of history differed from theirs, and this could not help but upset them. They did all this to the tune of the Soviet WWII anthem “The Sacred War” (“Arise, vast country”).

The main ringleader of these improvised torture sessions with elements of twisted historical facts was a guy of about 20, short—165–170 cm—call sign Sever.

In the last days of September, the soldiers began packing things and moving them out somewhere. They started taking us one by one to a room on the second floor of the administration building where there were various weapons—they forced us to hold them to leave fingerprints. They gave me a grey substance that looked like plasticine.

Around October 2 or 3, they took us out into the corridor one by one and showed us where to sign on sheets of paper. The text itself was covered by a blank sheet. I don’t know what I signed. They did not inform me of what I was accused of.

Editor: Dmitry Tkachev