Russia is torturing its Ukrainian captives

VOLODYMYR MYKOLAYENKO is 65, but looks ten years older. A former mayor of the Ukrainian city of Kherson, he was detained by Russian forces during their eight-month occupation in 2022. Freed at the end of August, he is now giving interviews from a hospital in Kyiv. And that is refocusing attention on what the UN’s human-rights mission in the capital calls Russia’s “systematic and widespread” torture and ill-treatment of its prisoners.

Civilian and military detainees are treated equally badly. According to a UN report last month, of 216 released civilians it interviewed 92% gave accounts of abuse. The methods included beatings, electric shocks, stress positions, ritual humiliation and rape. For soldiers the percentage is even higher. Mr Mykolayenko describes being beaten several times a day, and particularly severe “welcome beatings” each time he was transferred to a new facility. Food was so poor that he and his fellow prisoners lost drastic amounts of weight, and sanitary conditions so bad that many caught scabies. The only dental treatment he saw, once in the three years, was a tooth-pulling without anaesthetic. One guard, he says, made a practice of beating prisoners’ hands with a mallet. “Once I asked him ‘Why are you doing this?’ For a reply, I got a beating on the head.”

Singled out for particularly brutal treatment are members of one of Ukraine’s most prestigious military units, the Azov Corps. A 26-year-old junior lieutenant in the corps, Yan Danylko, was released earlier this year. Halfway through a masters degree in law when Russia launched its invasion, he signed up and took part in the battle for Mariupol, surrendering when the city fell after a three-month siege. During his three years in Russian captivity he lost a third of his weight. Standard abuses were beatings and being made to stand for 12 hours at a stretch; more elaborate positions included “the motorcycle” and “the starfish”, both unendurable for more than 20 minutes. For those who signed confessions or turned informer he has no blame: “You’ll do what they want you to do, sign what they want you to sign.”

A new development is the prosecution of Azov prisoners for membership of a terrorist organisation, Russia having so designated the unit in 2022. Nestor Barchuk, a human-rights lawyer with the corps, says at least 130 men have been given sentences of ten years or more, and that dozens more are under investigation.

Can anything be done? Russia is immune to shaming, and its own internal checks are a joke. Lieutenant Danylko describes a visit by a Russian ombudsman, when he and his fellow prisoners were given new uniforms, and better food on ceramic instead of aluminium plates. A TV crew filmed handouts of biscuits and warm clothes. “That evening they took everything away again. It was a one-day Potemkin show.” If anything, detainees’ treatment is worsening as they are dispersed to distant regions. (The UN has identified new detention sites in Siberia and Karelia.) Loudly as the outside world protests against Russia’s flouting of human-rights law, Ukraine’s only lever is prisoner exchanges. Swaps are proceeding in dribs and drabs, but Ukraine is on the defensive, so large-scale captures are unlikely soon.

Today, Lieutenant Danylko is getting used to a prosthetic leg. Still painfully thin, Mr Mykolayenko says he is trying to blot out his three years in captivity. Thinking about them is “worse than the worst horror film”. He is nonetheless giving interviews because “it’s important that people understand what they are dealing with. The biggest lesson I have learned is that you can’t negotiate with evil. And Russia is evil.” It is hard to find a Ukrainian who disagrees. ■