Exclusive | Be Cruel : Inside Russia s Torture System for Ukrainian POWs – WSJ

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.

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. 

The guards would rotate through Russia s prison system, serving a month at a time in prisons before other teams took their place. Across the country, other units from Buryatia, Moscow, Pskov and elsewhere received similar instructions.

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.

via www.wsj.com

Thomas Grove.