By Anthony Galloway and Kate Geraghty
Valentin Barannyk shows the scarring from having his wrists bound when detained in Trostyanets, Ukraine.Credit:Kate Geraghty
As Olekdsndr Fayizov shines his torch down the stairs leading to the basement of a railway station, about 30 bloody ovals appear on the wall. These are the marks made when Russian interrogators bashed prisoners’ heads against the concrete.
Fayizov was one of those prisoners, and he proceeds to demonstrate how it was done.
Olekdsndr Fayizov, 41, shows where Russian soldiers beat prisoners’ heads against the wall in the basement of the Trostyanets railway station.Credit:Kate Geraghty
This is the anatomy of the torture cell: in the centre of a tiny, darkened room, there stands a wooden desk. Narrow corridors open up on two sides, leading to the spaces where the Russian soldiers slept. Now it’s a crime scene, one of hundreds being examined by investigators across Ukraine.
Torture is a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Given Russian soldiers appear to have deployed it wherever they went in Ukraine, stacking up each case is now a monumental task for Ukrainian investigators and international organisations looking into war crimes. Ukrainian authorities have also been accused of torturing some of their prisoners since the Russian invasion.
In a four-part series, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age is revealing new details of apparent war crimes committed in Ukraine – including torture, unlawful killings and abductions – based on first-hand accounts of victims and witnesses.
It all started for Fayizov on the second day of the invasion, February 25, as the 41-year-old technician hid in bushes and reported to the Ukrainians the movement of Russian tanks rolling through his city of Trostyanets, about 40 kilometres from the Russian border.
Four days later, the Russians returned and captured the city.
For more than two weeks Fayizov laid low, only venturing out to stock up on supplies. But early on the morning of March 16, five masked Russian soldiers arrived at his house, took his phone and passport and held him at gunpoint in front of his mother.
Pulling a hat over his eyes, they told him: “We will take you to a secret place.”
Not so secret. It was only two minutes from his home; Fayizov knew it was the local factory. After duct-taping his eyes and hands, the Russians started beating him, questioning him over the whereabouts of the Ukrainian military and then beating him again.
Then he was brought to that cell below the railway station.
For all the beatings and interrogations, Fayizov still regards his captors as incompetent – rookie soldiers in way above their heads.
On the back of a door in the basement of Yahidne school is a calendar of the 25 days nearly 400 residents of the town were kept by Russian soldiers. On the left is a list of names and dates of seven people shot by Russian soldiers. On the right the 10 people who died due to conditions in the basement. Credit:Kate Geraghty
He says they even asked if he had helped the Ukrainian military.
“They were dumb as f—,” Fayizov says. “They didn’t even search me. I had my second phone and passport in my inside pocket all the time I was there.”
The soldiers were brutal if prisoners pushed back.
Just ask Valentin Barannyk what happened when he tried to escape a beating.
“I had my ass shot through,” Barannyk says, before pulling down his pants to show us the hole in his right buttock. “Three ribs broken, injured forehead. They shot over my ear. There’s even a bullet hole in the collar of my jacket.”
Valentin Barannyk shows where he was shot by soldiers who occupied Trostyanets.Credit:Kate Geraghty
After a man named Mykola dared to express disappointment with the prisoners’ treatment, Russian special forces kicked him to death, Fayizov says.
Fayizov tried to cry out for help, but he says Russian soldiers yelled back: “We don’t care, f— off, you bastards. The more of you who die, the better. We will kill you all anyway.”
His account differs dramatically to that of a Russian soldier who was on guard at the train station, who recently told a social media channel no one was killed.
“There was one drunk who died because of his alcohol fever. Nobody touched him,” says the Russian soldier, whose voice Fayizov recognises. “They threw him in there and he kept hitting his head on the wall.”
After Mykola died, there were five prisoners left in the room. On March 25, after days of noise, Fayizov says all of a sudden there was silence.
Slowly, he worked his hands and legs free of their bonds and broke open the cage in which the prisoners were held.
In the space where the Russian soldiers had been sleeping he found piles of garbage, empty bottles and human faeces.
The scene of squalor suggests a chaotic unit of soldiers drinking heavily, who lashed out in rage and beat their prisoners without even a detailed plan of what to do with them. It also fed this survivor’s contempt for his captors. Fayizov sees them as less than human.
A destroyed Soviet tank monument in the street near the Trostyanets railyway station.Credit:Kate Geraghty
“I mean they are not humans, I don’t know,” he says. “How can a human being shit beside the place where he sleeps? It’s awful. I just refuse to understand. They have no self-respect at all.”
The Russians had left in a hurry that morning, so Fayizov walked past the bombed-out ruins of the town to his home. All that was left intact when the Ukrainians arrived the next day was an abandoned Russian tank.
A town locked in a basement
A similar story of chaos and filth can be found some 385 kilometres away in the village of Yahidne, north-east of the capital Kyiv.
Here, practically the whole town of 371 people were confined in a dark basement of the local school. From March 5 to April 2, at least 10 people died there, mostly the elderly who suffocated in the airless crush. According to Ukrainian authorities, 17 more people were killed outside, likely executed.
Nadiya Tereshchenko, 65, was among those who spent 27 days in the “death basement”. Her neighbour was the first to die of suffocation.
Nadiya Tereshchenko, 65, in the garden of her home in Yahidne. north-east of Kyiv, where the entire village were locked in a school basement by Russian soldiers.Credit:Kate Geraghty
“They wouldn’t let us bury the dead,” she says. “Before dying, the people went mad. They started talking funny and hallucinating.”
Ivan, 62, says if the Russian soldiers wanted to interrogate or execute someone, they would take them upstairs. He never saw the soldiers shoot prisoners, but they never returned.
Residents of Yahidne inside the basement of a school, a day after Russian troops left. Nadiya is the seated woman in the red jumper.Credit:Reuters/OLHA MENIAYLO
As in Trostyanets, Ivan paints a scene of debauchery and disarray.
“They would get drunk, come down with a flashlight and give a child a grenade to play with,” he says.
“There was no hygiene, the conditions were awful. The feet went numb, the skin cracked, sores would appear. The children were sick constantly. There wasn’t enough water.”
Ivan, 62, stands in the doorway of a basement room in a school in Yahidne where nearly the entire village of 371 people were held. The seven names on the wall are of those who died.Credit:Kate Geraghty
In the kindergarten and school where the soldiers slept, remnants of their disorderly occupation and hurried withdrawal are laid bare.
Clothes, open cans of food, empty bottles of vodka and cigarette butts are scattered throughout the rooms. Smudges of human excrement lie just metres from their sleeping quarters.
Ivan says the village will never reopen the school in that building.
“We may turn it into something else. But it can’t go back to being a school and kindergarten.”
With Fedir Sydoryk
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