It is a house hidden by a large gate just behind the school in the recently liberated village of Velika Oleksandrivka, (Greater Alexandria) very close to the front line, near Kherson, after eight months of occupation. The Russians had settled there, in the house of the local police chief.
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Lyda lives next door and she is still haunted by the screams. “The screams were terrible, remembers the old lady. I’ve heard that maybe four times. I saw young men going down to the basement. It was so unbearable that I had to go back to my house.”
“The neighbors who went to see said that the walls and the floor were covered with blood and that the Russians are torturing with electric shocks: it’s unimaginable to hear that…”
Irina was tortured in this basement with her husband and her grandmother. She refuses to testify: it is Nina, her friend, who recounts the torture with electricity and the mock executions.
“They tortured them in the basement, Nina remembers. She was barefoot, it was cold. They put handcuffs on her and her husband and asked her to say what information they had, because they suspected them of knowing things.”
“They turned on the power… And later they put a sack over his head and, at the edge of the river, they made him believe that they were going to execute him.”
“Yes, they tortured people, resumes Nina. Some died as a result of torture. For example, they found something on the cell phone of a man I know: they took him to this basement. When they let him out, he died very quickly. They were very cruel, especially the soldiers of the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.”
Most were reported by neighbors. In this village, say the two women, many inhabitants collaborated with the occupier and today they walk around with their heads held high, as if nothing had happened.
Accusations of torture against Russian troops in Ukraine: the report by Gaële Joly and Laurent Macchietti
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