Ukrainian officials and former detainees said Monday that Russia has carried out a systematic campaign of torture against prisoners of war and civilian detainees, with captives held incommunicado and subjected to beatings, electric shocks and sexual abuse. Thousands of Ukrainians are still believed to be held in Russian custody.
Russia rejected the allegations during an informal U.N. Security Council session. Maria Zabolotskaya, Russia’s deputy U.N. representative, dismissed the claims as a “disinformation campaign” and accused Ukraine of subjecting Russian prisoners to “torture and degradation and moral and physical abuse.”
Khuan Alberto Levya Garsiya, an active member of the Ukrainian military, said his Russian captors subjected him to virtually every form of torture imaginable during his 1,183 days in captivity.
“Yes ... I was tortured,” he told reporters after the U.N. meeting. “Anything you can think of that can be done hurtful, humiliating to a man, unwillingly. Anything that comes to your mind, not only verbal, physical abuse, daily beatings, electrocution, excessive, excessive exercises in freezing cold when it’s minus degrees, sexual abuse. Everything that can be applied to a person into making a person break mentally. It was all applied to me and most of my comrades.”
Garsiya said he was lucky to survive, but two of his friends were beaten to death in detention centers in the Donetsk region. Prisoners were held in “overcrowded barracks without adequate conditions,” where “almost all POWs were ill with dysentery” and many were starving, he told the U.N. meeting.
Garsiya, who has a Cuban father, said guards targeted him in particular because of his Latino name, accusing him of being “a mercenary and an American spy.”
Crimean Tatar activist Leniie Umerova, who was released in a prisoner exchange in 2024, said she was detained while trying to visit her seriously ill father in Crimea.
She said she was transferred through “seven detention facilities” in what she described as “a carousel of repression” and accused Russia of using torture against Ukrainians in captivity.
Oleg Gushin of the Ukrainian government’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War said Ukrainian prisoners were “killed and tortured” in detention.
He said Kyiv had identified “more than 300 places of detention” in Russia and occupied Ukrainian territory and that more than 9,000 Ukrainians had been returned through exchanges, while “thousands” remained in Russian captivity.
Ukraine’s Chargé d’Affaires Volodymyr Pavlichenko called for greater international pressure and accountability over Russia’s treatment of prisoners.
U.N. Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Claudia Fuentes Julio said U.N. monitoring showed that “widespread and systematic torture and ill-treatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilian detainees by the Russian Federation authorities continues,” including sexual violence.
The U.N. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights had documented the execution of 129 Ukrainian prisoners of war at the beginning of their captivity and the deaths of 48 in custody since February 2022, resulting from torture, denial of medical care or other inhumane conditions of detention, she said.
More than 95% of Ukrainian prisoners of war interviewed reported experiencing torture or ill-treatment, she said.
More than half also reported sexual violence, including “rape, gang rape, beating while nude, beatings to the genitals, electric shocks to the genitals and nipples, and degrading treatment of a sexualized nature.”
Fuentes Julio said the U.N. had received “consistent accounts of severe beatings with objects such as batons, heavy belts, and wood, electric shocks, dog attacks, mock executions, and other forms of torture.”
She said the OHCHR had also documented torture and ill-treatment of Russian and third-country national prisoners of war held by Ukraine, but “on a fundamentally different scale.”
About half of the Russian and third-country prisoners interviewed reported abuse during the initial stages of captivity, she said.
