Prisoners and officials in Russian ‘torture prisons’ in Ukraine exposed by the BBC

The prisons these men helped run are part of prisons where the United Nations Office for Human Rights (OHCHR) says the suffering and abuse of civilians is “systematic and widespread.”

Former detainees describe beatings, electric shocks, mock executions and sexual abuse, saying civilians are often arbitrarily detained and families are given little information.

The Kremlin accused the OHCHR of bias. In May this year, the United Nations added Russia to a blacklist of countries suspected of committing sexual violence in conflict zones – a charge Russia dismissed as “baseless lies”.

According to Ukrainian authorities, more than 16,000 innocent citizens have been captured or disappeared. Some of these cases They followed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – and others in 2012. Until 2014, Russia annexed the southern Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and annexed eastern Ukraine, prompting widespread international condemnation.

At the time, Lyudmila was working as a security engineer at a poultry farm in Novoazovsk, Donetsk region, near the border with Russia.

Russian-backed armed groups have taken control of the city, resuming years of military control.

Lyudmila said she takes care of orphans and takes food to Ukrainian forces; They gave her a Ukrainian flag with notes of thanks written on it. She believes that the photo of the flag, which she shared with her trusted friends, was arrived by Russian-backed forces: “That’s probably why they arrested me.”

She is accused of espionage and taken to Isolation – a factory turned modern art gallery taken over by Russian-backed forces. It later became widely known and feared due to many reports of torture from former prisoners.