 |
| Photo Credit: AP |
KOZACHA LOPAN, Ukraine (AP) — In a dank basement behind the local supermarket, metal bars cordon off a corner of the room to form a large cell. Dirty sleeping bags and duvets show three sleeping spots on top of sheets of Styrofoam for insulation from the damp earth floor. In the corner, two black buckets served as toilets.
A few meters
(yards) outside the barred cell, three dilapidated chairs stand around a table,
cigarette butts and empty husks of pumpkin seeds littering the floor around
them.
Ukrainian
authorities say this was a makeshift prison where Russian forces abused
detainees before Ukrainian troops swept through the village of Kozacha Lopan in
a major counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region this month. President Volodymyr
Zelenskyy has said more than 10 such “torture chambers” have been discovered in
the region since the hasty withdrawal of Russian troops last week. The claims
of what occurred in the room could not be independently confirmed.
Kozacha
Lopan, whose edge lies less than two kilometers (just over a mile) from the
Russian border, was retaken by Ukrainian forces Sept. 11.
In a
statement posted Saturday on its Telegram channel, the prosecutor’s office of
the Kharkiv region, in whose jurisdiction Kozacha Lopan lies, said the room
seen by AP journalists was used as a torture cell during the occupation of the
area. It said Russian forces had set up a local police force that ran the
prison, adding that documents confirming the functioning of the police
department and implements of torture had been seized. The statement said an
investigation was being conducted.
Images the
prosecutors released showed a Russian military TA-57 telephone with additional
wires and alligator clips attached to it. Ukrainian officials have accused
Russian forces of using the Soviet-era radio telephones as a power source to
shock prisoners during interrogation.
In his
nightly address to the nation Saturday, Zelenskyy mentioned another location,
at the railway station in Kozacha Lopan, where he said “a room for torture and
tools for electric torture was found.” AP journalists did not see that
location.
Zelenskyy compared
the Russians to the Nazis during World War II.
“And they
will answer in the same way — both on the battlefields and in the courtrooms,”
he said.
Burial sites
have been found in some areas where Russian forces were pushed out, most notably
in the city of Izium, where Ukrainian officials say more than 440 graves have
been found near the city’s cemetery. Zelenskyy has said they contain the bodies
of civilian adults and children, as well as soldiers, showing signs of violent
deaths, some possibly from torture.
Vitalii, a
commander in the National Guard, said his team is hunting for graves of
possible victims of abuse at the detention center in Kozacha Lopan. He asked to
be identified by his first name only for security reasons.
The team is
also recovering bodies on the battlefield, which are lying where they fell on
farm fields or inside burned-out tanks. The Russian army was pushed all the way
back across the border into Russia after holding the area for months. But
artillery shells still whistle through the air, fired from inside Russia and
landing with resonating thumps and billows of black smoke on Ukrainian
territory.
Despite the
shelling, a small group of soldiers winds its way along a rutted mud track to
where a dead Ukrainian combatant lies, spotted by a drone used to search for
bodies and shallow graves.
“It’s a
risk. We are always risking our lives and at any moment there might be some
shell flying in from the territory of Russia,” Vitalii said.
The dead
Ukrainian is lying on his back in body armor and helmet, a cap beneath it to
block out the sun. The body has been there for a long time.
They
document the scene and lift the remains into a body bag before heading farther
along the track to a charred Russian tank. It takes only one of the team to
carry away the body bag holding the remains of the Russian found inside.
Autopsies
will follow, and the details of the sites recorded and passed on to
investigators looking into potential war crimes, Vitalii said.
Throughout
this border area, where fierce battles raged, villages bear the devastating
scars of war: houses bombed and burned, roads pitted with craters from
exploding mortar shells, smashed cars lying by the roadside.
In the days
after the Russians were chased out, local people have been returning to see
what is left of their homes.
“Three days
before we decided to leave, it was like hell in here” from all the shooting,
said Larysa Letiucha, 56, in the nearby village of Prudyanka. “It was flying
from all over the place. It was whistling and exploding. We hid in the basement
and … our door was blasted off.”
She left
with her family in April, and returned to check on her property a few days
after Ukrainian soldiers retook the village.
“I saw a
horror. I still cannot pull myself together,” she said in recounting her first
sight of what remained of her house. “We were living here our whole lives. We
were building it, making renovations. Our whole life was invested here.”
The windows
are blasted in and the ceiling leaks from where a patch is missing from an
explosion. In the small house her parents built on the same plot, the entire
back part is missing. Shrapnel and debris litter the house.
“Our houses
are comfortable even though we live in the village,” Letiucha said. “It’s a
horror. I don’t even know when we will renovate and rebuild all of this.”