In the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the head of St. Petersburg’s prisons delivered a direct message to an elite unit of guards tasked with overseeing the influx of prisoners from the war: “Be cruel, don’t pity them.” Maj. Gen. Igor Potapenko had gathered his service’s special forces at the regional headquarters to tell them about a new system that had been designed for captured Ukrainians....Needless to say, this is not only an unambiguous violation of the Geneva Conventions it is pure evil. Not only has Russia under Vladimir Putin targeted Ukrainian civilians, including children, with their missiles, not only have they removed thousands of Ukrainian children from territory they've captured and sent them deep into Russia to be raised as Russians, but they've committed untold atrocities against combatants.
Normal rules wouldn’t apply, he told them. There would be no restrictions against violence. The body cameras that were mandatory elsewhere in Russia’s prison system would be gone.
Those meetings set in motion nearly three years of relentless and brutal torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war. Guards applied electric shocks to prisoners’ genitals until batteries ran out. They beat the prisoners to inflict maximum damage, experimenting to see what type of material would be most painful. They withheld medical treatment to allow gangrene to set in, forcing amputations.
Three former prison officials told The Wall Street Journal how Russia planned and executed what United Nations investigators have described as widespread and systematic torture. Their accounts were supported by official documents, interviews with Ukrainian prisoners and a person who has helped the Russian prison officials defect.
Russia has a long history of cruelty in its prison system, reaching back to the earliest decades of the Soviet Union, when Joseph Stalin created labor camps for those deemed dangerous to Soviet rule. In recent decades, Russia has taken some steps to improve conditions, such as separating first-time offenders from the rest of the prison population, and some regions have introduced body cameras for guards after years of campaigning by human-rights groups....The sadism of people who would do this to other human beings is truly Satanic. It reminds me of the words of Richard Wurmbrand, a Lutheran pastor, who spent years ina communist prison in Romania in the late 40s and early 50s. Wurmbrand wrote in his book Tortured for Christ that,
While dealing with Ukrainian prisoners of war, they were tasked with working with local prison guards to direct the POWs’ activities. They interpreted Potapenko’s instructions at that March 2022 meeting as a carte blanche for violence, said the two former guards. They pushed their mistreatment of Ukrainians to a new level with the belief that they had the permission of their leadership, said one of the former guards.
While on duty, the guards wore balaclavas at all times. Prisoners were beaten if they looked a guard in the eye. Those measures, along with the month-long rotations, were taken to make sure individual guards and their superiors couldn’t be recognized later, said one of the former officers....
Pavel Afisov, who was taken prisoner in the city of Mariupol in the initial months of the war, was among the first Ukrainian prisoners detained in Russia....
He said beatings were the worst when he was transferred into new prisons. After arriving at a penitentiary in Russia’s Tver region, north of Moscow, he was led by guards into a medical examination room and ordered to strip naked. They shocked him repeatedly with a stun gun while shaving his head and beard.
When it was over, he was told to yell “glory to Russia, glory to the special forces” and then ordered to walk to the front of the room—still naked—to sing the Russian and Soviet national anthems. When he said he didn’t know the words, the guards beat him again with their fists and batons.
The violence served a purpose for the Russian authorities, according to the former guards and human-rights advocates: making them more malleable for interrogations and breaking their will to fight. Prison interrogations were sometimes aimed at extracting confessions of war crimes or gaining operational intelligence from prisoners who had little will to resist after they suffered extreme brutality....
The former guards described a staggering level of violence directed at Ukrainian prisoners. Electric shockers were used so often, especially in showers, that officers complained about them running out of battery life too fast.
One former penitentiary system employee, who worked with a team of medics in Voronezh region in southwestern Russia, said prison guards beat Ukrainians until their police batons broke. He said a boiler room was littered with broken batons and the officers tested other materials, including insulated hot-water pipes, for their ability to cause pain and damage.
The guards, he said, intentionally beat prisoners on the same spot day after day, preventing bruises from healing and causing infection inside the accumulated hematoma. The treatment led to blood poisoning and muscle tissue would rot. At least one person died from sepsis, the officer said.
Many of the guards enjoyed the brutality and often bragged about how much pain they had caused prisoners, he said.
Ukrainian former POW Andriy Yegorov, 25, recalled how guards at a prison in Russia’s western Bryansk region would force prisoners to run 100 yards through the hallway, holding mattresses above their heads. The guards stood to the side and beat them in the ribs as they ran by.
When they got to the end of the hall, they would be forced to do sit-ups and push-ups. Each time they came up, the guards would punch them or hit them with a baton.
“They loved it, you could hear them laughing between themselves while we cried out in pain,” he said....
When a man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil, there is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil that is in man. The Communist torturers often said, “There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish. I heard one torturer say, “I thank God, in whom I don’t believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.” He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners.The Wall Street Journal's account continues:
Two of the longest-held prisoners of war, both Afisov and Yegorov spent around 30 months in the Russian prison system before they were finally released in a swap that brought them home on Oct. 18. Yegorov found out during his medical checkup following the exchange that he had five broken vertebrae....One wonders how much of this the Russian people are aware of. Do they know what their leaders do? Would they care if they did know? Did seventy years of atheistic communism dull their consciences to the point of turning them into moral zombies? These are the same questions people asked seventy-five years ago of the German people when the atrocities of the Nazis came to light.
After returning home, Afisov resisted sleep for days, fearing it could turn out to be a dream and he would wake up back in prison. “Then whenever I finally trusted myself enough to fall asleep all I had was nightmares,” he said.
The former prison officials were preparing to start new lives when they spoke with the Journal. They are now living in undisclosed locations and have had to cut off contact with people they had known all their lives. One of them said he had always been a Russian patriot and never wanted to live anywhere else but Russia. But after the war began, he said, he couldn’t stay in the country or remain silent. He said giving testimony to the ICC was one way to work toward justice.
After the 20th century, the horrors of 9/11 and October 7th in this century, and the atrocities committed by the Russians in their war against Ukraine, it's hard to believe those who tell us that humanity is making moral progress.
