Torture Is a Tactic in Occupied Ukraine
Ukrainians Tell of Brutal Russian Repression in Occupied Territories
Moscow is employing a variety of tactics, including torture and forced Russian citizenship, to try to obliterate Ukrainian identity, former detainees and human rights groups say.
By Carlotta Gall and Oleksandr Chubko
For months after the Russian military occupied his hometown in southern Ukraine, Yevheny made plans to leave. But each time, the 48-year-old lawyer said, he was thwarted, by warnings of gunfire on the roads and, once, when a hired driver disappeared. Then came the Russian soldiers, who searched his house, hauled him off to a nearby village and cast him into a dark cellar where he would undergo a violent, weeklong interrogation. Yevheny’s harsh treatment is just one example of a colonialist repression Russia is enforcing across the Ukrainian territory it controls, a system comprising a gulag of more than 100 prisons, detention facilities, informal camps and basements that is reminiscent of the worst Soviet excesses...
The abuses almost always occur unseen and unheard by the outside world, as Russia-controlled areas are largely inaccessible to independent journalists and human rights investigators. But human rights organizations and Ukrainian prosecutors and government officials have managed to monitor the situation closely, drawing on accounts from civilians who are either still living there or who have found a way to leave. The ultimate aim of Moscow’s efforts, rights advocates said, is to extinguish Ukrainian identity through such tactics as propaganda, re-education, torture, forced Russian citizenship and sending children to live in Russia...
The fate of Ukrainians in these areas is one reason Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has said he would not accept a peace deal that would cede territory to Russia. “Ukraine does not trade its land, and does not abandon its people,” he said at a conference on Crimea in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, in September...
Ukrainians who have escaped Russian occupation said it was like living in a cage, where travel is restricted and many live in fear of arbitrary violence or detention. Information is controlled and inhabitants are subjected to relentless propaganda in the media, in schools and in the workplace.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/30/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-torture-abuse.html