‘If there’s a hell on earth…’: Ukrainians describe horrors of Kherson occupation

By Reuters: Residents in Ukraine’s southern metropolis of Kherson name the two-storey police station “The Hole”. Vitalii Serdiuk, a pensioner, stated he was fortunate to make it out alive.

“I hung on,” the retired medical gear repairman stated as he recounted his ordeal in Russian detention two blocks from the place he and his spouse reside in a tiny Soviet-era house.

The green-roofed police constructing at No. 3, Energy Workers’ Street, was essentially the most infamous of a number of websites the place, based on greater than half a dozen locals within the not too long ago recaptured metropolis, individuals have been interrogated and tortured throughout Russia’s nine-month occupation. Another was a big jail.

Two residents dwelling in an house block overlooking the police station courtyard stated they noticed our bodies wrapped in white sheets being carried from the constructing, saved in a storage and later tossed into refuse vans to be taken away.

Reuters couldn’t independently confirm all the occasions described by the Kherson residents.

The Kremlin and Russia’s defence ministry didn’t instantly reply to questions on Serdiuk’s account or that of others Reuters spoke to in Kherson.

Moscow has rejected allegations of abuse in opposition to civilians and troopers and has accused Ukraine of staging such abuses in locations like Bucha.

On Tuesday, the U.N. human rights workplace stated it had discovered proof that each side had tortured prisoners of struggle, which is classed as a struggle crime by the International Criminal Court. Russian abuse was “fairly systematic”, a U.N. official stated.

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As Russian safety forces retreat from massive swathes of territory within the north, east and south, proof of abuses is mounting.

Those held in Kherson included individuals who voiced opposition to Russia’s occupation, residents, like Serdiuk, believed to have details about enemy troopers’ positions, in addition to suspected underground resistance fighters and their associates.

Serdiuk stated he was overwhelmed on his legs, again and torso with a truncheon and shocked with electrodes wired to his scrotum by a Russian official demanding to know the whereabouts and unit of his son, a soldier within the Ukrainian military.

“I didn’t tell him anything. ‘I don’t know’ was my only answer,” the 65-year-old stated in his house, which was lit by a single candle.

‘Remember! Remember! Remember!’ was the fixed response.”

‘PURE SADISM’

Grim recollections of life under occupation in Kherson have followed the unbridled joy and relief when Ukrainian soldiers retook the city on Friday after Russian troops withdrew across the Dnipro River.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said two days later that investigators had uncovered more than 400 Russian war crimes and found the bodies of both servicemen and civilians in areas of Kherson region freed from Russian occupation.

“I personally noticed 5 our bodies taken out,” said Oleh, 20, who lives in an apartment block overlooking the police station, declining to give his last name. “We may see arms hanging from the sheets and we understood these to be corpses.”

Speaking separately, Svytlana Bestanik, 41, who lives in the same block and works at a small store between the building and the station, also recalled seeing prisoners carrying out bodies.

“They would carry useless individuals out and would throw them in a truck with the rubbish,” she said, describing the stench of decomposing bodies in the air. “We have been witnessing sadism in its purest type.”

Reuters journalists visited the police station on Tuesday but were prohibited from going beyond the courtyard, rimmed by a razor wire-topped wall, by armed police officers and a soldier who said that investigators were inside collecting evidence.

One officer, who declined to give his name, said that up to 12 detainees were kept in tiny cages, an account corroborated by Serdiuk.

Neighbours recounted hearing screams of men and women coming from the station and said that whenever the Russians emerged, they wore balaclavas concealing all but their eyes.

“They got here within the store daily,” said Bestanik. “I made a decision to not speak to them. I used to be too afraid of them.”

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RESISTANCE FIGHTERS

Aliona Lapchuk said she and her eldest son fled Kherson in April after a terrifying ordeal at the hands of Russian security personnel on March 27, the last time she saw her husband Vitaliy.

Vitaliy had been an underground resistance fighter since Russian troops seized Kherson on March 2, according to Lapchuk, and she became worried when he did not answer her phone calls.

Soon after, she said, three cars with the Russian “Z” sign painted on them pulled up at her mother’s home where they were living. They brought Vitaliy, who was badly beaten.

The soldiers, who identified themselves as Russian troops, threatened to smash out her teeth when she tried to berate them. They confiscated their mobile phones and laptops, she said, and then discovered weapons in the basement.

They beat her husband in the basement savagely before dragging him out.

“He did not stroll out of the basement; they dragged him out. They broke by means of his cheek bone,” she said, sobbing, in the village of Krasne, some 100 km (60 miles) west of Kherson.

Lapchuk and her eldest son, Andriy, were hooded and taken to the police station at 4, Lutheran Street, in Kherson where she could hear her husband being interrogated through a wall, she said. She and Andriy were later released.

After leaving Kherson, Lapchuk wrote to everyone she could think of to try and find her husband.

On June 9, she said she got a message from a pathologist who told her to call the next day. She knew immediately Vitaliy was dead.

His body had been found floating in a river, she said, showing photographs taken by a pathologist in which a birth mark on his shoulder could be seen.

Lapchuk said she paid for Vitaliy to be buried and has yet to see the grave.

She is convinced her husband was betrayed to the Russians by someone very close to them.

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‘THE HOLE’

Ruslan, 52, who runs a beer store opposite the police station where Serdiuk was held, said that at the beginning of the occupation, Russian-made Ural trucks would pull up daily before the grey front door.

Detainees, he said, would be hurled from the back, their hands bound and heads covered by bags.

“This place was known as ‘Yama’ (The Hole),” he said.

Serhii Polako, 48, a trader who lives across the street from the station, echoed Ruslan’s account.

He said that several weeks into the occupation, Russian national guard troops deployed at the site were replaced by men driving vehicles embossed with the letter “V”, and that was when the screams started.

“If there’s a hell on earth, it was there,” he said.

About two weeks ago, he said, the Russians freed those being kept in the station in apparent preparation for their withdrawal.

“All of a sudden, they emptied the place, and we understood one thing was occurring,” he instructed Reuters.

Serdiuk believes he was betrayed by an informant as the daddy of a Ukrainian serviceman.

He stated Russian safety personnel handcuffed him, put a bag over his head, pressured him to bend on the waist and frog-marched him right into a automobile.

At the station, he was put in a cell so cramped that the occupants couldn’t transfer whereas mendacity down. On some days, prisoners acquired just one meal.

The following day, he was hooded, his arms sure, and brought all the way down to a cellar room. The interrogation and torture lasted about 90 minutes, he stated.

His Russian interrogator knew all of his particulars and people of his household, and stated that until he cooperated, he would have his spouse arrested and phone his son so he may hear each of them screaming below torture, Serdiuk stated.

Two days later, he was launched with out clarification. His spouse discovered him outdoors the store through which Bestanik works, just about unable to stroll.

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Published On:

Nov 17, 2022