Two Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) were beaten and “castrated” by drunk Russian soldiers using pocket knives inside a detention facility.
According to reports, the two Ukrainian survivors, ages 25 and 28, were carried to a Russian labour camp where they were imprisoned for one and three months, respectively.
The two were put through a “worse than hell” ordeal by Vladimir Putin’s army, and they were only released following a prisoner swap.
Anzhelika Yatsenko, 41, who is providing both of them with psychological counselling, is concerned that the trauma they experienced has affected both their minds and their physical bodies.
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’.
‘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.
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.
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.’