Two Ukrainian prisoners of war have described the ‘horror’ of being held at a Russian torture camp (Picture: Getty Images)
Drunk Russian soldiers beat up and ‘castrated’ two Ukrainian prisoners of war (POW) with a pocket knife inside a torture camp.
The Ukrainian survivors, aged 25 and 28, were reportedly dragged to and held at a Russian torture camp for one and three months respectively.
Vladimir Putin’s soldiers put the two through an experience ‘worse than hell’ and only found freedom after a prisoner exchange.
Both are now receiving psychological support from Anzhelika Yatsenko, 41, who worries that the trauma they faced is not just literally etched onto their bodies, but their minds too.
Both struggled to tell Yatensko what took place inside the camp for the first month under her care, the Poltava-based psychiatrist told The Sunday Times.
But then they finally did open up, Yatsenko said she recoiled at the stories of savage, booze-fuelled beatings they suffered and had to go to the bathroom mid-session to ‘cry and cry’.
UN human rights officials have described a litany of war crimes committed by Russian hands (Picture: AP)
‘I’d never heard anything so horrible,’ she said, adding: ‘I didn’t want them to see as they might think there’s no hope.’
Yatsenko said that one of the men struggles to know how he is even alive as there was ‘so much blood’.
‘If there’s hell somewhere, it’s worse than that,’ one told her.
The troops can never be sexually active again after intoxicated Russian soldiers ‘castrated’ them both with a pocket knife, cruelly telling them they’re doing it so they can never have children.
It was an act Yatsenko described as ‘genocide’.
Both soldiers have since been discharged from Yatsenko’s care and returned to duty in the Ukrainian army.
Kyiv put the number of war crimes committed by Russia in April alone at more than 6,000 (Picture: AP)
Russia has long denied committing war crimes throughout its year-long ‘special operation’, though Ukraine and UN experts see differently.
UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, sounded the alarm on Thursday of the ‘widespread’ use of physical and psychological torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war by the Russian military.
‘The alleged practices include electric shocks, beatings, hooding, mock executions and other threats of death,’ the UN expert said.
‘If established, they would constitute individual violations and may also amount to a pattern of State-endorsed torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.’
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that in April alone, Russia committed 6,000 alleged war crimes.
Having spoken with more than a thousand victims and witnesses, the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner (UNHCR) said in a March report that torture has been seen against civilians, too.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has long denied any war crimes being committed during his war against Ukraine (Picture: AFP)
In capturing the chilling atrocities of the grinding, year-long war, investigators said they found evidence that Russian troops have raped and tortured children and attacked without distinguishing between civilians and combatants.
Three Ukrainian men were found dead in a cellar in the capital Kyiv, their hands and legs bound and fingers severed off, the UN’s human rights agency said in one example.
‘In Kyiv region, in March 2022, two Russian soldiers entered a home, raped a 22-year-old woman several times, committed acts of sexual violence on her husband and forced the couple to have sexual intercourse in their presence,’ the report said.
‘Then, one of the soldiers forced their four-year-old daughter to perform oral sex on him, which is rape.’
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‘If there’s hell somewhere, it’s worse than that.’