BALAKLIYA, Ukraine – The Russian military has spent weeks searching for Mariya, the 65-year-old ordinary wife of a serving Ukrainian Army officer.
Twice, she said, they searched her house in a village outside the town of Balakliya, and when they finally took her into custody a few months later, they tortured her repeatedly during questioning, using electric shocks. and threats of rape.
The recapture of much of the Kharkiv region by Ukrainian warplanes a month ago is revealing the lives of thousands of people who have lived under Russian military occupation since the early days of the war. For many, there have been periods of calm, but little food or public service. For people like Mariya, accused of sympathizing with or helping Ukrainians, it’s pure hell.
Mariya said: “To put it bluntly, it was a horror. “I thought I wouldn’t be able to survive.”
Police officers who have returned to towns and villages to re-establish Ukrainian authorities have been overwhelmed by complaints of theft and property damage, as well as excuses for detention and torture. and missing relatives.
The scale of population abuse in eastern Ukraine under Russian occupation is most likely larger than that seen in the spring of 2018. Bucha and other areas around the capital Kyiv, based on the breadth of the territory and the length of the occupation, police officials said.
So far, police officers have recorded more than 1,000 cases of people being detained at police stations and detention facilities across the region, said Serhii Bolvinov, Kharkiv provincial police chief. The real number is probably two or three times that number, he said.
According to witnesses, torture was routine. The sheriff said signs of abuse were evident in some of the 534 bodies found across the area. “There were bodies that were tortured to death,” he said. “Some people have their hands tied, they’ve been shot, they’ve been strangled, some people have been cut, they’ve had their genitals cut off.”
Last week, in a small cemetery in the middle of an empty field on the edge of the town of Borova, a father stood silent as Ukrainian investigators carried out the terrifying task of exhuming and autopsiing his son’s body. , Serhii Avdeev. Mr. Avdeev’s wife found his bullet-riddled corpse in a pit at camp vacated by the Russians a few days earlier when they withdrew.
The murder of 33-year-old Avdeev, a welder who previously served in the Ukrainian army, is just the latest topic of interest to war crime prosecutors. He was one of hundreds of corpses recovered from dozens of towns and villages recaptured by Ukrainian troops in northeastern Ukraine.
On Saturday, a team of French and Ukrainian forensic experts conducted an autopsy on Avdeev’s body in a morgue in Kharkiv, discovering at least 15 bullet holes and four bullets in his body. One of his fingernails and part of his finger were severed.
Accounts of detainees showed the same pattern of abuse, including beatings and electric shocks during interrogations, at most random police stations and prisons across the region. Some prisoners were kept in open-air cages in the city of Kupiansksaid a witness.
Mariya was held for 40 days in a police detention center, where she endured hours of interrogation, was electrocuted and threatened with rape and death. Once, she fell off her chair, lost consciousness, and turned around to be kicked in the head by someone.
She said, examining their accents, she concluded that most of her interrogators were Russian, and demanded to know where her husband was. They also repeatedly accused her of being a bomb target for the Ukrainian Army.
From the cell, she could hear men and women screaming in pain. “The men screamed so hard I can’t describe it enough,” she said, crying. She says she understands from the screams that women are being sexually assaulted (although she says she herself isn’t). “If they took my underwear off, you can imagine what they did to the girls.”
There is another element in her persecution that is petty and vengeful.
Mariya hides in an empty apartment near the school where she works as a cleaner, but she assumes someone has revealed her location to the Russians. In July, masked Russians banged on the door and called her name.
A second time searching her home, the Russians spray-painted the letter Z – the symbol of the Russian occupation force – on every wall and door, including the inside of the refrigerator, and attacked her husband’s car with an ax and a gun. .
Another resident of Balakliya, 30-year-old Serhii, a lumberjack, was detained by Russian soldiers in the woods near his home while he was walking his dog with his brother and a friend. The three men were stripped, beaten and tortured.
“They want to know where the Ukrainians are,” said Serhii, who only gave his name for fear of reprisals, should the Russians return. “They asked questions to which we had no answers.”
Then, at 3 a.m., they were taken into the woods, dug trenches, and underwent a mock execution. “I thought they were dead,” Serhii said of his friends, his face contorting as he burst into sobs.
The men were held in a basement and then released for two weeks without explanation.
Investigators reopening police stations across recaptured territory have uncovered hundreds of men and women with similar stories: beaten and tortured for allegedly serving in the Army Ukraine, have military relatives or are simply pro-Ukrainian.
But even more have been detained for a minor infraction, such as breaking a curfew, or being accused of being a spy or stalker.
Serhii Pletinka, 33, a mason living near the town of Shevchenkove, has been arrested twice, accused of being a Nazi element, selling illegal humanitarian aid and plotting to kill the police chief. Russia appointed.
His accusers were all local men who had worked with the new pro-Russian government, and one of them had a long-standing dispute with him, Mr. Pletinka said.
Another man in his village, 28-year-old Oleh, who has been detained for two weeks, said most of those making the accusations were motivated by money or petty revenge. “Police officers made false accusations in order to receive rewards,” he said. “They did it for the money.”
Residents look forward to when some of their neighbors begin to enjoy their newfound power and drive new cars, said Mr. Pletinka, even though things don’t go well for all of them. Among his fellow prisoners, he said, was the first mayor appointed by Russia, who was later accused of embezzling public funds and arrested.
Much who have cooperated, including the imprisoned mayor, fled the country when Ukrainian troops recaptured the region and is believed to be in Russia, he said. But Mariya said her neighbors, some of whom, she recounts, stole her belongings and farm tools while she was in custody, remained hostile, one of whom he said bought property from the Russians.
At the Kozacha Lopan police station, which has a major Russian base near the border, investigators found a military phone used to administer electric shocks, along with documents identifying the police chief Russia appointed each station in charge.
The Russians and those close to them often express an obsessive suspicion of followers and others who may be helping the Ukrainian Army. They confiscated cell phones to prevent people from communicating with the other side, and even nailed the mobile phone to a tree on the main square of Kozacha Lopan to frighten the public, Ukrainian police said. know.
“They are trying to establish a new rule,” said an investigator in Balakliya, who gave his name only, Kyrylo, for security reasons. “And they ruled with violence.”
The detentions continued until the end, even as Russian forces were retreating.
Mr. Avdeev, who served in the army, was initially questioned and beaten by the Russian military, but was not arrested. Then, on September 9, as Russia’s hold on the region unraveled, Russian-backed separatists from the Luhansk region took him away.
His family found his body a week later in an abandoned Russian camp.
Oleksandr Chubko and Denys Tsiba contributed reporting from the Kharkiv region.
