Shocks, beatings, mock executions: in the detention centers of Kherson

They brutally beat prisoners and tortured them with electric shocks, waterboarding and mock executions. Three people died in their custody. But their sense of impunity was so great that the Russians who took control of a detention center in southern Ukraine last year and filled it with 200 prisoners were careless about concealing their identities.

Last week, Ukrainian prosecutors announced war crimes charges against four members of the Russian National Guard — the commander who ran the detention center and three of his subordinates. They were charged in absentia with cruel treatment of civilians and violations of the laws of war.

The case is one of the first to emerge from months of investigations by Ukrainian prosecutors in the southern region of Kherson, which Russian troops occupied for more than eight months until they were forced out by a Ukrainian counter-offensive in November. Investigators say they have uncovered hundreds of crimes committed during the Russian occupation, including executions and deaths in custody, torture, sexual assaults and beatings in the recaptured territories.

Researchers in the Kherson region have found 11 detention centers with torture chambers where men and women were abused. The four men charged with war crimes oversaw the remand center at No. 3 Thermal Energy Street, in the center of the region’s capital, Kherson. Some of the victims helped identify them using photographs taken by the Russian National Guard that took over the detention center last summer.

Two men and a woman died at the center, researchers said. The men had been beaten and all three had not received health care, the researchers said, adding that 17 detainees said they had been subjected to sexual torture involving electric shocks to the genitals.

The four Russians charged are Colonel Aleksandr Naumenko from the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, Aleksandr Bocharov from the Krasnodar region, Anver Muksimov from Stavropol and Aleksandr Chilengirov from the Orenburg region.

The National Guard was created in 2016 by President Vladimir V. Putin to consolidate the various units of the Russian Interior Ministry. The National Guard, which is separate from the armed forces, is responsible for internal security and reports directly to the president.

Investigators said they identified the National Guard unit using Ukrainian intelligence information, intercepted phones and witnesses. Much of the violence was senseless and used during interrogations to extract confessions, Ukraine’s attorney general Andriy Kostin wrote in a statement. Facebook message about the Kherson case.

“People were ‘pushed out’ confessions about things they didn’t do,” he wrote, comparing the methods to those used by the secret police during Joseph Stalin’s purges.

Oleksii Sivak, 38, a Ukrainian sailor who became an activist during the occupation and painted Ukrainian flags, national symbols and graffiti around the city of Kherson, was arrested in August; during interrogations he received beatings and electric shocks, including to the genitals. He managed to identify at least one of the suspects.

“Each question was followed by an electric shock or a blow,” he said in an interview in Kiev. “If you fell to the floor from the electric shock, they kicked you and put you back in the chair.”

The shocks lasted about an hour, with only 30 seconds of intermission, he said. “The moment you come in, they start doing it and they take turns doing it on this dynamo machine,” he said. “There was a man who asked questions and men who tortured.”

At one point, he caught sight of his interrogators as they tore off a knitted cap covering his eyes and put a gun to his head to force a confession.

“I saw two security guards and two intelligence officers at that time take me out of my house,” he recalls. The men all wore balaclavas, he said, as did the colonel in charge of the detention center.

But the guard who escorted him to the torture chamber didn’t bother to wear a mask, Mr. Sivak said, and he was able to identify the guard from photos.

Mr Sivak’s neighbour, Roman Shapovalenko, 38, who was arrested on the same day, said in an interview that he suffered electric shocks and beatings that broke his ribs. On one occasion, his torturers stabbed him in the leg and jumped on his chest, he said, and he passed out several times while being waterboarded. Another time, his torturers took off the hat that hid his eyes and made him attach the wires to his genitals himself. He saw at least three people in the room, but they were all wearing balaclavas.

Mr. Shapovalenko said the most painful torture involved electric shocks to the earlobes. “You’ve got lightning in your eyes,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep for three days.” He joked with his cellmates that he had been given a Wi-Fi connection and that he saw YouTube videos and war movies playing before his eyes.

One of Mr Shapovalenko’s cellmates, a man in his 50s named Ihor, died from the vicious beatings he received, he said. Ihor was interrogated for three or four days and after returning him to the cell, the Russian guards ordered him to write a statement and kept shaking him awake to prevent him from sleeping. On the fourth day they let him sleep, but then it was too late and he died that night.

“They never read his testimony,” Mr Shapovalenko said. “We all thought that’s how we’d end up.”

Another man, Serhii Ruban, 42, a sales consultant, also died in the detention center, prosecutors have determined. His mother, Nina Ruban, 70, said she last saw him alive when he was arrested on June 12. Six days later, she was told at army headquarters that her only son was dead.

Two witnesses saw him severely beaten in the hallway and in their cell, prosecutors said, and a third witness took his body to the morgue. Investigators found his body among the remains in a mass grave, and in February his mother identified him by a tattoo on his knuckles. He had multiple rib fractures, leaving her in no doubt that he had been beaten to death.

“He was completely broken,” she said, crying.

Oleksandr Chubko And Dyma Shapoval reporting contributed.