Special report: One prisoner recalls how a man was beaten to death next to him. Another recounts being stripped, stabbed and subjected to electric shocks. In recently liberated Trostyanets in Sumy, Bel Trew speaks to torture victims and uncovers fresh evidence of possible war crimes in northeast Ukraine. Blindfolded, arms and legs bound, and lying in the corner of the torture room, Dima could only hear his fellow prisoner scream and his ribs crack, as the man was beaten to death next to him. The soldiers had grunted with exertion as they bound the prisoner – Kolya – into the “lastochka” or “swallow” position, an infamous torture method long favoured by Russian forces. They then got to work as they always did in this makeshift cell below the railway station in Trostyanets, a northeastern Ukrainian town near the border with Russia. (…) Trapped in a purgatory of darkness that erased time, Dima thinks Kolya was murdered on the second or third day of his captivity – but he cannot say for sure. “They kept the body next to me until the morning when they removed it and brought in two more people,” he adds. For 10 days, survivors of this room – all civilians – say they were starved, tortured, subjected to multiple mock executions, threatened with rape and forced to sit in their own excrement by soldiers under Trostyanets station. This is just part of a slew of new testimonies obtained by The Independent that provide fresh evidence of possible war crimes in Ukraine’s northeastern region of Sumy.
via independent: Bound, beaten, killed: Ukrainian civilians reveal horrors of Russian torture chamber