Russian soldier says he was subjected to American torture while in captivity in Ukraine

A Russian serviceman captured by the Armed Forces of Ukraine told the story of his captivity and torture that he was subjected to.

Photo: flickr.com by Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, CC BY-SA 2.0

A Russian soldier named only as Viktor was captured in April 2022. He spent six months in Ukrainian captivity before he returned home as part of the exchange of prisoners of war between Russia and Ukraine.

According to the man, he got lost after he was concussed during a fight. The man was sure that he was going in the right direction when he came across a group of Ukrainian fighters. They handed Viktor over to the Ukrainian marines, who tied him up and took him to the river.

"There is this American torture known as waterboarding. It was April. They drove me into the water. I was tied up, my eyes were bandaged, I couldn't see anything. They started drowning me," Viktor said.

Then they pulled the man out of the water, but the torture did not end — they began to carve symbols on the Russian soldier's body. Then they burned him with a gas cylinder. Viktor was subsequently taken to Kyiv to a local blogger to try to obtain compromising material for Russia, but the man refused to cooperate.

In early October, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) published a report stating that since 2023, 104 Russian POWs out of 205 interviewed in Ukraine reported torture. The vast majority of acts of torture or ill-treatment took place in unofficial or transit locations, including garages, basements or private homes.

"Six to eight men took turns kicking and beating me, using hammers, batons and metal pipes. They were doing it for three to four hours,” the report quoted a Russian soldier captured by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

The Russian Foreign Ministry earlier said that Ukrainian soldiers drove people into basements in the city of Sudzha in the Kursk region. They were subjected to moral pressure and then used for reports made by Ukrainian and foreign journalists.

The Russian Foreign Ministry also said that the Armed Forces of Ukraine created concentration camps for civilians in the captured territory of the Kursk region. Information about the existence of concentration camps was collected on the basis of witness statements and data from the Kursk headquarters of the Russian Red Cross.