The photo shows the body of the unknown man with countless scars. From his chest to his stomach region, a huge scar of a long incision that seems to be primarily attached. A large part of the right side of the torso is confiscated by the burnt slogan, while on the left you can also see a large scar.
According to Andrij Joesov, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian intelligence service, the photo was taken by a doctor who investigated the prisoner, after he arrived in Ukraine again as part of a major exchange of prisoners of war. “Unfortunately the photo is real. The doctor who the man examined was the devil and took the photo. This is proof of what happens to our defenders while they are trapped,” Joesov explains in Novaya Gazeta.
“Unfortunately the photo is real. The doctor who the man examined was the devil and took the photo. This is proof of what happens to our defenders while they are trapped,” explains Joesov in the Novaya Gazeta.
According to the spokesperson, many of the returned prisoners of war showed ‘criticism of weight loss’ and that is once again a sign that Russia systematically violates the Geneva conventions in which the human treatment of prisoners of war has been recorded.
It is not the first time that reports about the mistreatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war come out. On the contrary, since the start of the war it has been known that Russia violates war law in every possible way. Several times there have been images of Ukrainian prisoners of war who were executed on the spot on the front. And there are now numerous witness statements from returned former prisoners who experienced stories about the horrors they experienced in the Russian camps.
In April of this year, the Ukrainian NGO Media Initiative for Human Rights published the Technologies of Terror report (the technologies of the terror) in which forty prisoners report on the tortures they had to endure in Russian imprisonment.
Prisoners such as Ivan Dibrova, a Ukrainian marine who was captured in the fighting in Marioepol in April 2022. He was taken to the prison camp near Olenivka where he was immediately confronted with the ruthlessness of his Russian guards on arrival. “They formed two rows, about 15 men on both sides armed with straps, necklaces and sticks,” he recalls. “They screamed” run! ” And while you ran they hit you until you collapsed. ” Then they continued to hit while you lay on the floor. ”
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What followed was an agony of interrogations accompanied by torture. “They pressed me against a wall and hit my back with a rubber bat. Then they turned me around and saw my tattoo – wings, a sign of freedom – on my chest. Fascist! Nazi! They screamed. They hit me against the ground. One of it stood on my head, another used a taser on my sexual parts.”
Learn patriotic texts
Dibrova was trapped for thirty months and has been mistreated and tortured all the time. He was forced to learn Russian patriotic texts by heart and thump and tried to recruit the Russian secret service. “Only the totally broken and agreed,” he says.
Dibrova saw five of his fellow prisoners die from illness and torture. He himself was infected with TB. “We were treated like animals, had to crawl through the corridors on our knees while they kicked our fingers.”
‘Gift’ on birthday
On his birthday, Dibrova received a “gift”, they hit him so hard that he peeed blood for two weeks. “But the worst thing was that you heard the others scream. One boy, they hit him, tied him to a chair, tortured him and cut one of his balls off. There was only one guard who said” I don’t want to do this, we are people after all. “He resigned.”
Eventually Ivan Dibrova was released through a prison exchange in April of this year. In captivity he had at least lost 35 kilos of body weight.
Fingers cut off, nails pulled out and raped: Ukrainians secretly tortured horribly tortured
Currently, at least eight thousand Ukrainians are being held in 186 Russian prisons, including at least 1600 civilians. In addition, according to the Ukrainian human rights organization Zmina, another 63,000 people are missing ‘under special circumstances’.
“In 29 of those prisons, barbaric inhumane torture is regularly tortured,” says Sevgill Moesajeva, a journalist from the Ukrainian Pravda. “People have to undress completely and are then left alone with trained dogs. They are immersed in ice cold water until they get convinced. They are hung upside down and tasped until they ‘confess’.”