‘Violence for violence’s sake’: New report details Russia’s inhumane treatment of Ukrainian POWs and civilian detainees
In January 2025, Russian human rights activists carried out their first monitoring mission in Ukraine since the Kremlin began its full-scale invasion. The Memorial Human Rights Center has now published the mission’s findings in a major report on Russian war crimes, including a section detailing the inhumane treatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilian detainees held in Russia and the occupied territories. Based on testimonies from former and current Ukrainian prisoners, the report reveals the harrowing conditions in 10 Russian penal colonies, detention centers, and prisons. However, according to the global initiative Tribunal for Putin (T4P), there are 280 such facilities in total: 196 in Russia and 84 in occupied Ukraine. Meduza summarizes the report’s main findings about some of Russia’s most notorious prisons.
Warning: The following story includes descriptions of torture.
The Olenivka detention center (Donetsk region, Ukraine)
The human rights observers conducted in-depth interviews with two Ukrainian servicemen who had been captured in Mariupol in the spring of 2022. One, a junior sergeant anonymized as “AA,” was freed in a prisoner exchange in September 2024. The other, a soldier anonymized as “VV,” was released as a result of an earlier swap, in February 2023.
The two soldiers said that immediately after they surrendered, they were taken by bus to a detention center in Olenivka, the site of a former penal colony in the occupied Donetsk region previously known as IK-120. At the time, the detention center held around 200 prisoners, though it had been reopened so quickly that it wasn’t prepared to accommodate them. Windows without panes were covered with plastic film, and the toilets had been torn out. According to the former POWs, the prison had neither running water nor heat, and for the first few days, they slept on the concrete floors. Though they later received mattresses, there wasn’t enough space for all of the prisoners, so they slept in shifts, and some were forced into the corridors.
AA said that upon arriving at Olenivka, the prisoners were forced to run through a “corridor” of prison guards, who beat them. The other eyewitness said that prisoners who fell down were beaten until the guards tired of it; then they were dragged over to a wall, forced to stand spreadeagle, and beaten again.
The prisoners were allotted two or three minutes to eat their meager meals and were prohibited from taking food back to their barracks. Those who tried to smuggle food were made to squat for long periods, beaten, and compelled to sing Russian songs. Meals were accompanied by boiling water or tea and mainly consisted of bread and, at lunchtime, half a plate of pearl barley or sauerkraut. But the biggest problem was the lack of drinking water: foul-smelling water was brought in by fire truck, and there was never enough for everyone.
During interrogations, prisoners were forced to stand hunched over and keep their heads down, so they wouldn’t see their interrogators. They were questioned about their call signs, where they had fought, what orders they had received, and whether they had sustained injuries. According to the former POWs, the interrogators were particularly interested in soldiers from Ukraine’s Azov Regiment. Prisoners were routinely beaten and tortured, and their fingers were broken during interrogations, particularly to extract confessions.
Recalling the missile strike that killed dozens of Ukrainian prisoners at Olenivka in July 2022, VV said that he was in a barracks roughly 50 meters (55 yards) from the one that was hit. He could hear screams coming from the burning building, but no one came to the prisoners’ aid.
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SIZO-2 in Ryazhsk (Ryazan region, Russia)
In April 2022, AA was transferred from Olenivka to Pretrial Detention Center No. 2 (SIZO-2) in Ryazhsk, a town in Russia’s Ryazan region. After a prison doctor examined the new arrivals, some of them were beaten by the guards. AA was forced to run through a “special forces corridor,” where he was kicked and beaten with batons. Then, the new prisoners were interrogated.
The detention center had special interrogation rooms on every floor. “Each room had a table with a [standard] ‘kit’: PVC pipes used for beatings, two kinds of electric shock devices, a box of needles for driving under fingernails, and bags they pulled over prisoners’ heads to strangle them. There was a container of ice water nearby to revive those who had fainted. Sometimes [the prisoner’s] head was submerged in the container to drown him as a form of torture,” AA recalled.
AA was interrogated 35 times over the course of 2.5 months. The interrogations lasted anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes. Those who couldn’t bear the torture and “confessed” to various crimes were transferred to a prison colony in Makiivka, an occupied city in the Donetsk region.
Prisoners were also regularly beaten during morning roll calls. Eyewitnesses said that prison guards and special forces officers beat the prisoners for fun. AA was beaten four times. Then in February 2023 he was transferred again.
IK-10 in Udarny (Mordovia, Russia)
AA was transferred to Penal Colony No. 10 (IK-10) in Udarny, a settlement in Russia’s Republic of Mordovia. According to the former POW, this prison had a particularly brutal “intake” process: new arrivals were forced to quickly strip naked and put on prison uniforms, all while being beaten with rubber batons. Many were then forced to lie on the floor for another beating. This lasted for about 40 minutes.
AA was put in a cell for 10 people, in a barracks that held around 300 Ukrainians. The prisoners could only go to the bathroom or drink tap water when ordered to do so. Each cell was allotted three minutes for showers.
The prisoners were expected to stand still for most of the day. For even the slightest infraction, they were beaten, set upon by dogs, and tormented. Sometimes the entire cell was punished as a group. AA recalled a prison guard commanding a German Shepherd to attack prisoners. “I was bitten twice: on the leg and arm. But [the dog] turned out to be much kinder than the people,” he said.
The first time the [German] Shepherd simply bit me and let go, and the second time the handler gave her commands — ‘grab [him], tear, bite’ — and she started to maul me. The dog bit a chunk of skin off [my cellmate’s] elbow, and the wound festered for a long time.
AA recalled being tortured with electric shocks “all over” his body (including his genitals) and forced to do hundreds of squats or march in place.
This treatment continued for AA’s first six months at the prison. By the time the prison staff eased up, he said, many of the prisoners had already developed varicose veins and gangrene in their legs. Although there were three doctors working at the prison, not all of the prisoners received medical care. According to AA, there was one doctor who did what he could to prevent the beating and tormenting of prisoners during medical exams. However, there was another physician whom the prisoners referred to as “Doctor Evil,” because he “treated any health complaint with electric shocks.” (Journalists from RFE/RL’s Ukrainian service and OCCRP later identified him as Dr. Ilya Sorokin.)
SIZO-2 in Taganrog (Rostov region, Russia)
Pretrial Detention Center No. 2 (SIZO-2) in Taganrog, a city in Russia’s Rostov region, began receiving Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilian detainees in the spring of 2022. Upon arrival, the handcuffed prisoners were thrown out of the transport trucks and beaten. They were forced to move through the prison’s corridors bent over, with their eyes downcast or closed.
According to Memorial’s findings, the guards at SIZO-2 in Taganrog were seconded special forces officers, who either used “violence for violence’s sake” or acted aggressively toward specific prisoners because of their affiliation with particular Ukrainian military formations or their patriotic tattoos. FSB officers were also ever-present at the facility: they used torture to extract false testimony and confessions from prisoners, and forced them to refuse legal representation.
The prisoners were forced to sing the Russian national anthem and Soviet-era songs. If someone made a mistake, their entire cell was punished. The prisoners were also forced to do physical exercises, like push-ups. If a prisoner was too sick to exercise, his cellmates had to do it for him.
According to one of Memorial’s sources, a Polish citizen was brought to the Taganrog prison in May 2022 after he “went traveling in Ukraine to see what was going on there, took a wrong turn, and drove into a Russian military checkpoint.” The Polish prisoner was regularly beaten for failing to learn Russian and because of Poland’s support for Ukraine. During one roll call, he was beaten so badly that he turned blue and could no longer walk. By June, he was dead.
SIZO-2 in Galich (Kostroma region, Russia)
The intake process for Ukrainian prisoners at Pretrial Detention Center No. 2 (SIZO-2) in Galich, a town in Russia’s Kostroma region, also involves passing through a “corridor” of guards wielding batons.
Prisoners there underwent interrogations, involving beatings and electric shocks, from 8:00 a.m. until 11:00 p.m. every day. While soldiers carried out the preliminary questioning, state investigators and officers in special forces uniforms handled further interrogations.
Prisoners were subjected to electric shocks and sexual violence, beaten with wooden sticks, hammers, and rubber batons, suffocated with plastic bags, drowned in containers of water, and their ears were burned with lighters. The prisoners were also forced to use knives or wire to excise tattoos bearing pro-Ukrainian symbols or inscriptions.
SIZO-3 in Kizel (Perm krai, Russia)
In September 2024, several dozen Ukrainian prisoners were transferred to Pretrial Detention Center No. 3 (SIZO-3) in Kizel, a town in Russia’s Perm krai. Memorial calls this facility the “second Taganrog” due to the severity of the torture reported there.
“The intake process in Perm was more severe than in Taganrog. They put a bag over [my] head and beat [me] as hard as possible. They broke [my] right arm from elbow to wrist. When I got to the cell, I lost consciousness,” one prisoner recalled.
According to the Ukrainian investigative outlet Slidstvo.Info, the former mayor of Dniprorudne in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region, Yevhen Matveyev, died after being tortured in captivity in Kizel. Russian authorities returned his remains to Ukraine in December 2024.
Prisoners held captive at the detention center said that they were forced to spend the entire day standing, forbidden from speaking to each other, subjected to constant beatings, allowed to go to the toilet or drink water only when ordered, and compelled to perform physical exercises. In addition, the windows of their cells were left open, even in winter, and the prisoners were not provided with warm clothes.
Slidstvo.Info also reported that Ukrainian journalist Viktoria Roshchyna, who was captured by Russian forces in an occupied area of Ukraine in August 2023, died in Kizel’s SIZO-3 on September 19, 2024.
