Traces of torture across Izyum

Note: This article contains photos depicting physical violence and people in extreme situations; they serve documentation purposes.

A deep, dark pit with dates scratched on the walls. A damp underground cell that has trapped the acrid smell of urine. A hospital. A police station. A kindergarten. All of these places - and a few more - served as torture sites during the Russian occupation of the Ukrainian city of Izyum.

Journalists from the AP news agency found a total of ten such places of horror. According to AP research, torture was arbitrary and routine during the six months that Russian troops controlled the city.

After the liberation in mid-September, mass graves with several hundred dead were discovered here. Most people died violent deaths, it said. Of around 450 bodies recently exhumed from a mass grave in the forest near Izyum, dozens showed clear signs of torture.

The dead were tied up, shot at close range, had broken limbs or stab wounds, according to the Kharkiv region prosecutor's office. The injuries correspond to what the survivors also show.

A doctor who treated hundreds of wounded during the Russian occupation reports that patients kept coming to him with injuries consistent with signs of torture. Among them were gunshot wounds in the hands and feet, broken bones, severe bruises, burns. No one told him the cause of the injury.

"Even when people came to the hospital, silence was the rule," says chief physician Yuriy Kuznetsov. Even if it was obvious. A soldier, for example, came with injuries to his hands that clearly came from restraints. But the man refused to explain what happened to him.

Men with links to the Ukrainian armed forces were repeatedly singled out by the occupiers, but every adult male was at risk of being captured. The UN human rights mission in Ukraine documented "widespread practices of torture or ill-treatment of civilian prisoners" by Russian forces and their allies, mission director Matilda Bogner said. And the torture of soldiers was systematic.

Andrij Kozar is one of the victims. The 26-year-old soldier, whose unit broke up in chaos when Russian troops moved in, says he was tortured on multiple occasions. The Russian soldiers arrested and tortured him three times, but released them each time because he had no information for them.

"They took, I don't know exactly what, some kind of iron, maybe glass rods and burned the skin bit by bit," says Kozar. Finally, the young man hid in a monastery. He said he was unable to contact his family. The family thought he was dead.

In the spring, Russian troops also arrested Mykola Mozyakyn for the first time. The 38-year-old had enlisted as a soldier after the start of the war. The occupiers threw Mozyakyn into a pit full of water, handcuffed him and hung him from them. “They beat me with sticks. They hit me with their hands, they kicked me, they stubbed out cigarettes on me, they stubbed out matches on me,” he says.

"They said, 'Dance!' but I didn't dance. So they shot at my feet.” After three days, the Russians dropped him off near the hospital with the instruction: “Tell them you had an accident.”

Only a few days later he was arrested again. This time he found himself in school No. 2, where he was beaten along with other Ukrainians. The school also served as a base and field hospital for Russian soldiers.

Mosjakyn was released again - and arrested again shortly afterwards. This time in the crowded garage of a hospital. More than a dozen other Ukrainians were captured with him, soldiers and civilians. Men were held in two garages, women in one, and another, larger one – the only one with a window – served as housing for Russian soldiers.

The women were held captive in the garage closest to the soldiers. Both Mosjakyn and Kozsar, who were both trapped at the compound at different times, remember the night screams. According to Ukrainian intelligence officials, the captured women were regularly raped.

It was also here that Mykola Mozyakyn watched as Russian soldiers pulled out the lifeless bodies of two civilians who had been tortured to death. "They tortured civilians at will," says Olha Saparoshchenko. "I only have one word: genocide," she explains, showing the journalists her brother Ivan Schabelnyk's grave.

He went into the woods with a friend on March 23 to collect pine cones to light a fire - and never returned. The family later learned from another man that they had been tortured together with him. The bodies of Ivan and his friend were finally found in the forest by a firewood collector in mid-August, in the last days of the occupation.

Schabelnyk's hands were shot, his ribs were broken, his face was unrecognizable. Among other things, he was identified by the jacket he was wearing, his uniform from the local grain factory.

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