The court found a 31-year-old citizen of the Russian Federation guilty, who during the temporary occupation of the Kherson region set up torture chambers in captured administrative buildings and personally tortured local residents. He was sentenced in absentia to 14 years of imprisonment.
The press service of the Kherson Regional Prosecutor’s Office reported this.
According to the investigation, in 2022 during the temporary occupation of Bilozerka the defendant, together with other Russian servicemen, set up a torture chamber in the premises of the district court. Local residents were illegally held there in an attempt to force them to cooperate with the occupation authorities.
The convict personally interrogated at least two civilians — a woman and a man. For refusing to cooperate he used physical violence: beating them with rubber batons, with fists and feet, and used electric shocks. The victims were threatened with execution, the rape of relatives, and long imprisonment. People were held without adequate food, water, medical care, or hygiene items.
The court found that he committed similar crimes in the captured building of the Main Department of the National Police in Kherson Oblast.
There they tortured the head (starosta) of one of the starosta districts, demanding information about community residents who help the Armed Forces of Ukraine and about participants in the partisan movement. The man was held in inadequate conditions, deprived of food, and during interrogations forced to shout slogans in support of the president of the aggressor state. He was beaten for speaking Ukrainian.
The victim was also subjected to electric shock torture, as a result of which he lost consciousness. After one of the interrogations the man regained consciousness only in the hospital. As it later turned out, the occupiers had taken him outside the settlement and left him in a field, where local residents found him and brought him to a medical facility.
According to the prosecutor’s office, since the beginning of the full-scale invasion courts have already handed down guilty verdicts against 14 representatives of the aggressor state for war crimes related to illegal deprivation of liberty, torture, and cruel treatment of the civilian population.
Recall, investigators of the National Police of Kherson region charged Mariupol native Serhiy Yevarlak, who is involved in the torture of people in Lazurne.