After the discovery of hundreds of bodies in this city of Donbass, several residents reported torture perpetrated by Russian forces during the occupation. One of them agreed to tell his ordeal to franceinfo.
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One evening in September, two weeks ago, Maxim heard the sound of a car in his street, he looked out the window. The Russian forces are there… This resident of Izium, in the Donbass, in eastern Ukraine, is arrested: “They got out of the car with their weapons. I saw them but there was no need to hide. I opened the door and immediately they put my face against the wall and they m handcuffed and searched. And then they took me downtown to the police building. There were cells there. The criminals were on the ground floor and in the basement were the political prisoners. “.
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The veil is lifted every day a little more on the living conditions under Russian occupation in this city of 45,000 inhabitants where 450 bodies were found buried in a forest on Thursday 15 September. According to several testimonies, residents of the city suspected of being Ukrainian spies were also tortured by the Russian occupiers, like Maxim.
Before the war, the forties was a journalist. Is that why the Russians arrested him? He does not know. He just knows that it was Russian secret service agents who tortured him for a week. “They put a bag over our heads to interrogate us, they took us to a room and tortured us with electricity, Maxim remembers. And with sticks they beat us. When I received electric shocks, unconsciously I convulsed, and it tightened the handcuffs. I should have had mythe wrists but I felt nothing but the pain of electricity.”
“They took us to a room and tortured us with electricity”: the testimony of Maxim, resident of Izioum
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His ordeal lasted a week, until the liberation of Izioum on Saturday September 10, until his jailers freed him before fleeing: “The day after my release, I went back to the police building to collect my passport. There were hundreds of them scattered everywhere.” According to the Ukrainian authorities, the Russian secret services conducted these types of interrogations for months in several towns in the region.