Electric shock torture and a meeting with Victoria Roshchyna. What Ukrainian journalist Iryna Levchenko told the court in the Kapralov family case

When establishing the witness’s identity at the beginning of the hearing, Judge Maxim Nikitin, in addition to the usual questions (full name, date of birth, place of employment), asked why Iryna Levchenko was being held in custody.

“Well, they decided I was a spy,” she replied with a wry smile. “On [Spetember] 3rd, they ‘delighted’ me with a sentence: 15 years. Even though I completely debunked all the speculation, but who would listen?”

“Under which article are you charged? Article 275?” the judge asked, implying “treason” charges.

“Article 276! I’m a citizen of Ukraine,” Levchenko replied, stressing she was accused of “espionage,” which is reserved for foreign nationals in Russia. She assured the court that she had no reason to frame the Kapralovs and called the couple “wonderful people.”

After that, attorney Oksana Olgerdt began questioning the witness and asked when and where she had met the Kapralovs.

Levchenko: “Well, I can’t give an exact date, because we met them in what’s called ‘the pit.’ It was in the city of Melitopol, on Dzerzhinsky Street, presumably at number 212. I didn’t look at the sign, but I think that’s right. It’s a one-story building that used to be a psychoneurological clinic. People were taken there unofficially. I ended up there after being detained by the police, following three weeks in a temporary detention facility in the village of Vesele, not far from Melitopol, which wasn’t operational at the time. Then they brought me to this building with a bag over my head and put me in a separate room.

I saw Olha and Gennady around the end of August—I can’t say for sure, but I know we celebrated my birthday, September 16, together. I mean, the guard let us talk. Olha was in another room, and Gennady was with the men—also in another room. At first, they put people in solitary rooms, just as small as the one I’m in here. And it wasn’t until a few days later that we were able to see each other while picking up our dinner.

When I saw [Olha], she was wearing a thin summer sundress in a yellow-green, marsh-like color—and her arms and legs looked exactly the same; she’d been beaten all over. She said her back was the same, but she didn’t want to undress or take off her long, floor-length dress. Our guard, Arsen, had given her some ointment to rub on [the bruises], and so had Gennady—because that ointment had previously been in the men’s room. She had been horribly beaten. As for Gennady, I know that they tried to knock out his teeth there—either with their hands or with something else.

It was from Olha that we first learned that, as it turned out, we hadn’t been officially arrested. By that time, I had already been sitting there since May 29, expecting that, well, they’d sort things out soon and let us go. And it wasn’t until early September or late [August] that we found out we weren’t officially registered anywhere. That this is the so-called ‘pit’—even though it’s as if we’re staying at home.”

Attorney Olgerdt asked whether Levchenko had witnessed any violence against Olha Kapralova while in the “pit.”

Levchenko: “Look… It’s hard to be an eyewitness from a locked room. The fact that I saw signs of beatings on her… She assumes—because she, too, was either in a bag or wearing a mask—she assumes they beat her with a water bottle. She doesn’t know what they used to beat her; she’s just assuming. Those of us who were tortured weren’t witnesses [to the torture of others]. I think we were together until the end of October. About two and a half months, maybe until November. I didn’t think any of this would be necessary. I thought they’d sort things out and let us go, so naturally I didn’t record anything. This is all from memory.

At first, Olha was in a room with another woman, a young woman named Victoria Roshchyna. Victoria died on her way to a prisoner exchange in August 2024, if I recall correctly. Then Olha was moved to another room, right next to ours. As for Gennady, he was with the men—there were about four or five of them there. I know some of them by name, last name, patronymic, and sometimes even their birthdays, because, as a creative person, I made birthday cards for some of them. If I’d known why I was being invited here, I would have brought the foil medal that Gennady, also a creative person, made for me; it says, ‘Ira, Skilled Hands.’ They try to take it away from me every time during searches; they’ve thrown it away before, but I manage to save it.”

Attorney Olgert: “Let’s go back to the events of that time when you were with Olha Kapralova. You saw her in that dress, a sarafane, and she’d been beaten. Did she have any new bruises?”

Levchenko: “I don’t remember. Maybe toward the end, when she disappeared from view for a moment. Nobody told us anything… We lived behind closed doors.”

The attorney then asks the witness to describe the room where she was being held.

Levchenko: “A one-story building. I think it used to be a psychoneurological clinic; there were twelve rooms in total. A very old building, perhaps from the 1950s or 1960s. Our only guard, Arsen—a forty-year-old Dagestani from Makhachkala—lived in one room. Another room served as the kitchen. Olya volunteered [in the kitchen] for a few days—even a week—after the previous volunteer was taken away. But then the FSB officers said, ‘You don’t need to be in the kitchen.’ And during those days, I even managed to sew an apron for Olya. They removed her from the kitchen, [even though] she cooked very well.

There were larger and smaller rooms; on [the inside of the doors] there were no handles. Naturally, they’d all been removed. They locked us in from the other side. There were windows—insulated glass units—but they were barred, and at the end of June, this Arsen painted them black from the inside as much as he could—can you imagine, through the fine bars? So you could still see little bits of light coming through.”

When the lawyer asks whether the clinic’s inmates were allowed to leave their rooms, Iryna laughs.

Levchenko: “What?! What are you talking about? We were all locked up. The only exception: the men were let out once [a day] in the morning so they could use the restroom and wash up—and they carried their own water bottles. It’s easier for the men; everyone here is an adult. Also, when I was admitted on May 29, as a woman 20 years older than [the guard], I asked him: ‘Could you let us go to the bathroom during the day as well, besides in the morning and evening?

That’s when we received our gruel and two slices of bread. In the morning we had tea with cookies, and in the evening—gruel.

And so the guard... well, he’s that kind of person, more or less kind. He would let the women out during the day when we knocked and asked to use the bathroom ourselves. You see, we can’t use a bottle.

There was another woman with me, a little younger than me, also named Iryna—we only had a three-liter jar with a lid in a plastic bag. Olya had another jar in the other room, the one next door. So we could knock [for the guard to let us go to the bathroom], as long as he wasn’t going somewhere—to headquarters or to the market for groceries and cigarettes…

But sometimes he’d just be lying there, watching TV or on his cell phone, and we’d have to knock for a long time. Sorry for going into such detail—it’s the only way I can explain how it really was.”

In response to a question from the attorney, Levchenko said that neither she nor the other detainees at the clinic had been told why they were being held there. A guard himself once let slip that the secret prison was run by FSB officers.

Levchenko: “Arsen mentioned this. Unfortunately, I didn’t catch his last name. When we were cleaning his room at his request, he pointed out a certificate of appreciation from Governor Yevgeny Balitsky hanging on the wall. Back then, I worked first as a journalist for Yevgeny Balitsky at one publication, then at another. And yes, I saw this Arsen’s last name—it’s a Dagestani name—but I didn’t remember it. Later, I also filled out paperwork for him—he was selling his Zhiguli, so it had to be done neatly. So I know, let’s say, his birthday; I know he’s from Makhachkala; I know his mother’s name, that he has a sister, and his daughter’s name—but, alas, I can’t recall his last name.”

In late August 2023, drunk security officers staged a mass beating of prisoners at the clinic just for fun, Levchenko continued.

Levchenko: “It was August 30 or 31; it happened to be a full moon. And suddenly, in the evening, we heard noise, swearing, and screams. Then we could hear the Russian national anthem being sung out of tune from the men’s cells. There were a lot of screams; I can tell you more about it later.

Arsen told us that it was either a professional holiday for the FSB or some other occasion—they’d been drinking and came to have some fun. So they were going from room to room; one of them was wearing a robe—apparently borrowed from some priest—and carrying a shovel, asking, ‘Do you want to receive сommunion?’ Among us was a forty-year-old priest from Tokmak named Konstantin Maksimov; he naively replied, ‘Yes, I do’—and was struck with the shovel. They [struck] my husband on the back—he was being held with me, just in a different room. Some were hit on the back, others on the buttocks. One of the men had two ribs broken. Arsen said, ‘They can do whatever they want. Even if they kill someone, nothing will come of it.’”

However, the women were not harmed during this beating. And it was likely thanks to this guard named Arsen.

Levchenko: “On the 30th or 31st [of August], when these representatives of the FSB—let’s put it this way—were making their rounds, our cells were the last ones. They were coming toward us from the far end, and we could hear the swearing, the screams, and everything else. Iryna and I were sitting there—two adult women, I’m 60 and she’s around that age—hugging each other, and we were terrified that they’d come for us next. Olha was in a tiny little room across the hall. And after what she’d been through—she was alone, while the two of us were together—she was in shock and later told us about it.

When they reached our room and asked who was inside, he replied—with a distinct accent—‘There are women here, and Olya is over there.’ Olya said she nearly fainted because, well, here there were just women, and there was Olya. And she imagined the door would open and that nightmare would start all over again. But Arsen didn’t open it.”

Attorney Olgert: “Were the Kapralovs taken to court for a pretrial hearing?”

Levchenko: “No. If they’d been taken away for a pretrial hearing, they wouldn’t have been brought back. That’s called ‘pulling them out of the pit.’”

Levchenko didn’t see any noticeable signs of beatings on Gennady Kapralov, but she remembered that he was limping. “He’s a man; he wasn’t with us. Second, he was fully clothed. I can’t remember exactly. I know it wasn’t just a tooth.”

Then, at Kapralov’s request, attorney Svetlana Sidorkina asked whether Levchenko had seen bruises on his face. The journalist replied in the affirmative: “There were marks, yes. I can’t say for sure right now whether it was under the right or the left [eye]. Because there were a lot of us there with various bruises. I know that Olha was worried the whole time that Gena was being beaten. I know that the beatings took place.”

Toward the end of the questioning, attorney Sidorkina asked whether Levchenko knew who had beaten the Kapralovs.

Levchenko: “You see, no one reported [any names] to us. When they took me to be tortured with electric shocks, the people [were] wearing masks, without badges or business cards that would state who was torturing us. They don’t introduce themselves, they don’t give their first or last names, and they don’t mention where they’re stationed, their unit, or their rank. Unfortunately. I saw the people, but they were wearing masks.

I recently filed a statement with the Investigative Committee with as detailed a description as possible. If I had to identify one of the two men, I would be able to—he has distinctive eyes. Remember those milky-blue bottles? Well, if you were to break glass like that… His eyes were piercing. He was taller than me. When he came to see us in the ‘pit’ again and my room was open—they’d let me out to use the bathroom at that moment—he recognized me, called me by name, and asked something like, ‘How’s it going?’ Can you guess how I was doing? He wasn’t wearing a hat at the time; his light blond hair was sticking out. You know, when a man takes off his hat—and it was apparently August, so it was hot—his short hair stands on end, and his was exactly one and a half centimeters long.

At one of the hearings, thanks to my lawyer, the judge was forced to record that I had been tortured, and then an ‘investigation’ was supposedly conducted. ‘Supposedly’ means this: they gave me just enough space to write by hand about this torture. In response, I later received three and a half typewritten pages stating that the temporary detention center in Vesele wasn’t yet operational in May and that they didn’t remember my last name. So they never even asked me. They shoved me and my husband in there, stripped us naked, dressed us, and shoved us into a room. And right outside the door, guards were simply taking turns—one after another—and they fed us periodically. [They wrote] that everything is now equipped with cameras everywhere, that an inspector comes every day and practically kisses everyone’s ass. No one remembers Levchenko, and that couldn’t have happened, because the temporary detention center didn’t start operating until September. There is my handwritten statement, three and a half typed pages... So how could that not have [happened]?”

The final question for Levchenko came from the prosecutor. He inquired as to the purpose of her torture: “Did they demand something specific while using violence, or did they just beat me for the sake of beating me?”

Levchenko: “Are you asking me that?”

Prosecutor: “Yes.”

Levchenko: “Look, there was no verbal abuse or humiliation. Thank God, unlike other women, they didn’t undress me or attach electrodes to my private parts. Others went through that. Just my arms and legs. They demanded: ‘Tell the truth.’ I told the whole truth, yet they wrote it down however they saw fit.

My legs were tied to the legs of an office chair—I have one just like it here now—and my arms were tied behind my back with electrodes attached to them. I had a blindfold over my eyes, secured with tape. One of them was sitting across from me—before they blindfolded me, I could see the back of the monitor. The second one was sitting somewhere behind my shoulder.

Being an educated person, I thought they’d actually brought me there [for questioning. On the way,] they told me: ‘We’re here; we’ve brought a polygraph; you’ll be tested on it.’ And I naively went in to tell the whole truth on the polygraph. Instead of a polygraph, there were powerful electric shocks; several times—at least five, I stopped counting after that, let’s just say five—I was literally thrown into the air along with the chair that was strapped to me. After they torture you like that, you’ll sign anything.”

“Thank you, Irina Yuryevna, for giving such detailed testimony. We won’t keep you any longer,” the judge concluded the questioning.

“Can I go home?” Levchenko reacted, immediately.

Editor: Dmitry Tkachev