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See the full story · 2 sourcesA file photo from May 2022 showing Ukrainian soldiers, who have surrendered, inside a bus at a detention facility in Olenivka, which is controlled by Russia.
Listen Summarise Former Ukrainian prisoners and officials accuse Russia of systematic torture, sexual abuse, and inhumane conditions for Ukrainian detainees. A UN report confirms widespread torture and sexual violence against Ukrainian POWs, with over 95% reporting abuse and many deaths in custody. Russia denies the allegations, claiming Ukrainian prisoners also face mistreatment, while thousands of Ukrainians remain captive amid calls for international accountability. AI generated
NEW YORK – Former Ukrainian detainees and Ukrainian officials accused Russia on Aug 10 of systematically torturing prisoners of war (POWs) and civilian detainees, holding captives incommunicado and subjecting them to beatings, electric shocks and sexual abuse, with thousands still in captivity.
Russia rejected the allegations, which were made at an informal UN Security Council meeting, with its deputy UN representative Maria Zabolotskaya calling them “a disinformation campaign” and alleging that Russian prisoners in Ukraine were subjected to “torture and degradation and moral and physical abuse”.
Khuan Alberto Leyva Garsiya, still an active member of the Ukrainian military, said his Russian captors subjected him to every imaginable form of torture during 1,183 days in captivity.
“Yes... I was tortured,” he told reporters after the UN meeting.
“Anything you can think of that can be done – hurtful, humiliating to a man, unwillingly. Anything that comes to your mind, not only verbal, physical abuse, daily beatings, electrocution, excessive, excessive exercises in freezing cold when it’s minus degrees... sexual abuse. Everything that can be applied to a person into making a person break mentally. It was all applied to me and most of my comrades.”
Garsiya said he was lucky to survive, but two of his friends were beaten to death in detention centres in the Donetsk region.
Prisoners were held in “overcrowded barracks without adequate conditions”, where “almost all POWs were ill with dysentery” and many were starving, he told the UN meeting.
A Ukrainian with a Cuban father, he said guards targeted him particularly because of his Latino name, accusing him of being “a mercenary and an American spy”.
Crimean Tatar activist Leniie Umerova, released in a prisoner exchange in 2024, said she was detained while trying to visit her seriously ill father in Crimea.
She described being moved through “seven detention facilities” in what she called “a carousel of repression” and accused Russia of using torture against Ukrainians in captivity.
Oleg Gushin of the Ukrainian government’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War said Ukrainian prisoners were “killed and tortured” in detention.
He said Kyiv had identified “more than 300 places of detention” in Russia and occupied Ukrainian territory and that while more than 9,000 Ukrainians had been returned through exchanges, “thousands” remained in Russian captivity.
Ukraine’s UN charge d’affaires Volodymyr Pavlichenko called for greater international pressure and accountability for Russia’s treatment of prisoners.
UN assistant secretary-general for human rights Claudia Fuentes Julio said UN monitoring showed that “widespread and systematic torture and ill-treatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilian detainees by the Russian Federation authorities continues”, including sexual violence.
Since February 2022, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) had documented the execution of 129 Ukrainian POWs at the beginning of their captivity and the deaths of 48 in custody, resulting from torture, denial of medical care or other inhumane conditions of detention, she said.
She said more than 95 per cent of Ukrainian POWs interviewed reported experiencing torture or ill-treatment.
She said more than half also reported sexual violence, including “rape, gang rape, beating while nude, beatings to the genitals, electric shocks to the genitals and nipples, and degrading treatment of a sexualised nature”.
She said the UN had received “consistent accounts of severe beatings with objects such as batons, heavy belts and wood, (and) electric shocks, dog attacks, mock executions and other forms of torture.”
Fuentes Julio said the OHCHR had also documented torture and ill-treatment of Russian and third-country national POWs held by Ukraine but “on a fundamentally different scale”.
She said about half of Russian and third-country prisoners interviewed reported abuse during the initial stages of captivity. REUTERS
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