Russian prison officials ordered guards to ‘be cruel’ to Ukrainian POWs from first weeks of war, encouraging torture — WSJ

New reporting from The Wall Street Journal details how Igor Potapenko, the head of Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region, ordered guards to subject Ukrainian prisoners of war to particularly brutal treatment from the very first weeks of the full-scale invasion.

Citing former prison officials and former prisoners, the newspaper reports that Potapenko instructed an elite unit of guards to “be cruel” to POWs and to “[not] pity them.”

These orders were part of a system created specifically for Ukrainians captured in the war, according to WSJ. The new policies, which were also implemented in other regions, removed body cameras and lifted official restrictions on the use of violence.

Ultimately, these measures paved the way for “nearly three years of relentless and brutal torture,” the paper reports. This included guards subjecting prisoners to prolonged electric shocks to their genitals, beating them while “experimenting” with different materials to maximize harm, and withholding medical treatment, allowing gangrene to progress until amputations were necessary.

The officials who spoke to WSJ reportedly entered a witness protection program after testifying to investigators from the International Criminal Court and are now living in undisclosed locations.