War

WSJ: In March of 2012, Russian Federal Penitentiary Service officers were ordered to mercilessly torture Ukrainian prisoners

After the start of the great war against Ukraine, the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service received instructions allowing them to use violence without restriction against Ukrainian prisoners.

The Wall Street Journal writes about this with reference to former employees of the department and former Ukrainian prisoners of war, Kommersant Ukrainian reports .

According to the newspaper, a few weeks after the invasion of Ukraine, the head of St. Petersburg prisons, Major General Igor Potapenko, sent a direct message to the FSIN guards with the words:

“Be cruel, don’t feel sorry for them (Ukrainian prisoners of war – ed.).”

Potapenko told them about the new system that had been developed for Ukrainian prisoners. He said that the usual rules would not apply, there would be no restrictions against violence, and that body cameras, which are mandatory in other places of detention in Russia, would disappear. The publication claims that other FSINs across the country have received similar instructions.

According to prisoners and human rights activists, guards wear balaclavas at all times while on duty. According to one of the former employees, these measures, as well as monthly rotations of guards, were taken to ensure that they and their superiors could not be recognized later.

According to the newspaper, the guards applied electric shocks to the genitals of prisoners until the batteries ran out. They beat the prisoners to inflict maximum damage, experimenting to see what type of material would be the most painful. They did not provide medical care to allow gangrene to develop, leading to amputations.

Prisoners were also beaten if they looked a guard in the eye.

pavlo Afisov, 25, who was captured in Mariupol, spent 2.5 years in captivity.

According to him, he was often transferred from prison to prison, and the worst beatings were between these transfers. For example, upon arrival at a prison in the Tver region of Russia, guards took him to a medical examination room and ordered him to strip naked. They shocked him several times with a stun gun while he shaved his head and beard. When it was over, he was told to shout “glory to Russia, glory to the special forces” and then ordered to go to the front of the room – still naked – and sing the Russian and Soviet anthems. When he said he did not know the words, the guards beat him again with their fists and truncheons.

According to former guards and human rights activists, the violence was carried out with a specific purpose: to make prisoners more amenable to interrogation and break their will to fight.

Interrogations in prisons were sometimes aimed at extracting confessions to war crimes or obtaining intelligence from prisoners who were unwilling to resist after being subjected to extreme cruelty.

Stun guns were used frequently, especially in the showers, the interlocutors said.

One former FSIN officer who worked with a medical team in Voronezh region said that prison guards beat Ukrainians until their police batons broke.

According to him, the guards deliberately beat prisoners in the same place day after day, preventing bruises from healing and introducing infection into the bruises. This led to blood poisoning, and the muscle tissue began to rot. He added that at least one person died from sepsis after this.