10/2/2023 0 Comments National guard held in limbo![]() “I saw, at that moment, two guards and two intelligence servicemen who took me from my home,” he recalled. I could not sleep for three days - Roman Shapovalenko, Ukrainian activist, on being torturedĪt one point, he caught sight of his interrogators when they pulled off a knitted cap covering his eyes and put a pistol to his head in a bid to to force a confession. You have flashes like lightning in your eyes. “There was a man asking questions and men who were torturing.” “The moment you enter, they start doing it and they take it in turns on this dynamo machine,” he said. The shocks continued for about an hour, with only 30-second breaks, he said. “If you fell from the electric shock onto the floor, they kicked you and put you back on the chair.” “Every question was followed by an electric shock or a punch,” he said in an interview in Kyiv. He was able to identify at least one of the men accused. Oleksii Sivak (38), a Ukrainian seaman who became an activist during the occupation, painting Ukrainian flags, national symbols and graffiti around Kherson city, was arrested in August last year he suffered beatings and electric shocks, including to the genitals, during interrogations. Photograph: Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times Oleksii Sivak, who was tortured with electric shocks and beatings during the Russian occupation of Kherson, photographed in Kyiv, Ukraine, earlier this month. “Confessions were beaten out of people about things they did not do,” he wrote, comparing the methods to those of the secret police during Josef Stalin’s purges. ![]() Much of the violence was gratuitous and applied during interrogations to force confessions, Andriy Kostin, the prosecutor general of Ukraine, wrote in a Facebook post about the Kherson case. Investigators said they had identified the national guard unit using information from Ukraine’s intelligence service, telephone intercepts and witnesses. ![]() The national guard, which is separate from the armed forces, is responsible for internal security and answers directly to the president. ![]() The national guard was established in 2016 by Vladimir Putin to consolidate Russia’s various Interior Ministry units. Investigators say they have uncovered hundreds of crimes carried out under the Russian occupation, including executions and deaths in custody, torture, sexual violence and beatings in the recaptured areas. The case is one of the first to emerge from months of investigations by Ukrainian prosecutors in the southern region of Kherson, which Russian forces occupied for more than eight months until they were forced out by a Ukrainian counteroffensive in November. They were accused in absentia over their treatment of civilians and violating the laws of war. Last week, Ukrainian prosecutors announced war crimes charges against four members of the Russian national guard – the commander who ran the detention facility and three of his subordinates. Yet such was their sense of impunity, the Russians who seized control of a detention centre in southern Ukraine last year and filled it with 200 detainees were careless about concealing their identities. They beat prisoners relentlessly and tortured them with electric shocks, waterboarding and mock executions.
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