When they took him in for interrogation, the Russian soldiers told Viktor Soldatov he would soon be allowed to return home.
He was released nine months later, having endured treatment that drove him to attempt suicide in his cell.
“They threw me on the table, spread me apart,” he recalls. “Four of them held me — two by my arms, two by my legs. They pulled my shorts off and started prodding my buttocks with, I don’t know, a rubber truncheon or something. I was in such a dark state that I didn’t understand anything anymore. ‘Do you know what we’re going to do to you?,’ [they said]. ‘All of us together, and each one individually?’”
Soldatov, an IT administrator for a dock-building factory in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, was detained in August 2022, a few months after the Russians’ lightning advance in the first weeks of the war placed much of the region under their control.
He never fully understood why he was targeted. In any event, he said, his interrogators often seemed more focused on torturing him than on extracting information.
“They weren’t interested in my answers to their questions,” says Viktor Soldatov. “Whatever I answered, it didn’t have any influence on the outcome. What they cared about was the process itself.”
By the time Soldatov was finally released, much of the Kherson region had been liberated in Ukraine’s last major successful counteroffensive. But now, as continued Western support looks increasingly doubtful, the tide of battle is once again turning in Moscow’s favor, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warning of a renewed Russian offensive this spring. And new stories continue to emerge of the depredations endured by those who find themselves at the Russians’ mercy.
Soldatov was one of four men from the Kherson region recently interviewed by OCCRP’s Ukrainian partner, Slidstvo.info, about their detention by the occupying forces. All four were civilians, though one joined a local defense formation after the invasion and two others were active in the underground resistance to Russian rule.
The stories the men told differ in many respects: One was held for just a day, the others for weeks or months. One was let go after his wife paid a ransom for his freedom, another spent months in a Russian prison colony before being freed in a prisoner exchange.
But what unites their experiences is the brutality with which they were treated. All four men described savage torture, their captors subjecting them to stress positions, waterboarding, and frequent beatings. In a phenomenon that has been less frequently aired in Ukrainian society, all four also said they faced sexual violence, including electric shocks to the genitals, penetration with foreign objects, and threats of castration.
“They’re lying to everyone, that nothing happens to the people who land in their jails,” says Serhiy Chudinovich, a priest with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church who was detained and tortured in March 2022. “When they say that their ‘filtration measures’ don’t involve violence? They do. And I’m a witness. … This is information from my own lips. I’m a source. Let the people know. I want them to know.”
Many of the specific details of the men’s accounts cannot be independently verified, though ?ll four cases have been investigated by Ukrainian prosecutors, who confirmed to reporters that the stories the men told conformed to what they had reported to law enforcement. In one case, a subpoena has been issued for one of the alleged perpetrators, a 23-year-old Russian soldier. The three other cases are still under active investigation.
According to the prosecutors, 101 cases of sexual violence against Ukrainian men by occupying Russian forces have been recorded, including 50 in the Kherson region. But this is almost certainly a vast undercount, since experts say men are often reluctant to report sexual violence.
“Sexualized violence is a tool to let them achieve what they want, and survivors will be uncomfortable talking about it, and they will talk about it as little as possible,” says Ihor Demyanyuk, the head of the war crimes investigations department with the Kherson regional police. “[But] it’s important to talk about this so that the whole world can see what’s happening in the country, what’s happening in the occupied territories.”
“This is what the Russian world looks like.”
The Russian government has broadly denied that its troops commit war crimes in Ukraine.
‘I’m Screaming, Of Course’
Chudinovich, the priest, has long been an activist for an independent Ukraine. As a teenager in 1990, when the country was still a Soviet republic, he says he was arrested for hanging yellow-and-blue Ukrainian flags around his hometown, just over a hundred kilometers north of Kherson.
When the Kherson region was captured by the Russians in 2022, his church in the regional capital became a point of resistance.
“The church turned into a place of exchange for everything: Food, services, medicines, fuel,” Chudinovich says, explaining why he thought the Russians targeted him. “I had no guns in the church and there could never be any. But we did things that they consider too dangerous. … The Ukrainian priest motivates the Ukrainian soldier.”
He was taken from his church, he says, by men who said they were from the “new police” and told his parishioners they were just taking the priest away for a “forty-minute conversation.” Lacking a blindfold, the men put a hat on his head to cover his eyes and took him to the police station on Kherson’s Luteranska street.
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