Investigators have found 63 remains with evidence of torture in the recently freed southern Ukrainian district of Kherson, the country’s interior minister was cited as saying early on Thursday.
“Now, 63 bodies have been discovered in Kherson region, but we must understand that the search has only just started so many more dungeons and burial places will be uncovered,” Interfax Ukraine news agency quoted Denys Monastyrsky as telling national television
Monastyrsky said law enforcement bodies had uncovered 436 instances of war crimes during Russia’s occupation. Eleven places of detention had been discovered, including four where torture had been practiced.
“Investigators are currently examining them and setting down every instance of torture. Exhumations are also taking place of the bodies of those who were killed,” Monastyrsky told the television, according to Interfax.
Andriy Kovalenko, a prosecutor in the Kherson regional prosecutor’s office, told the New York Times that testimony had been gathered on 800 detentions by Russians in the region. He said that the most common types of abuse inflicted on detainees were electric shocks, beatings with plastic or rubber nightsticks, and suffocation by pinching the breathing hose on a gas mask placed over a prisoner’s head.
Since Moscow invaded Ukraine in February, according to Ukrainian and international investigators, war crimes have been perpetrated in regions held by Russian forces.
Russia denies that its soldiers have carried out atrocities or targeted people. There have been mass graveyards discovered in other regions that Russian troops had previously occupied, some of which contained victims of torture whose bodies were buried there.
One of the first locations that Russia had taken control of was the Kherson region, which saw the departure of Russian servicemen last week.
In his evening video message on Sunday, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy announced that more than 400 crimes had been discovered in Kherson. He said the Russian army left behind corpses, broken infrastructure and landmines in what he described as “the same savagery it did in other regions”.