08-07-2025
- Politics
- Irish Daily Mirror
Horrors of Putin's prison where victims tied to electric chairs and castrated
Russian forces stand accused of perpetrating a brutal campaign of violence against Ukrainians, including the use of electric chairs and castration within a makeshift torture prison.
The town of Izyum in Ukraine was freed in 2022, uncovering mass graves and torture chambers where locals allege Russians employed electric shocks to torment anyone suspected of aiding the resistance.
Shocking photographs have surfaced depicting a homemade electric chair secured to the ground with a metal pole, positioned next to a wall with exposed wires. This chair was found in a room at the Izyum police station, a site where unspeakable acts of torture are said to have taken place.
Taras Berezovets, a member of the Ukrainian army's special forces Ivan Bohun brigade and the unit's spokesperson, shared these harrowing images online. Berezovets asserted that the Russians "used electric shocks to torture prisoners of war and civilians".
He described how the "chair stands on a wooden platform" which allows the individual conducting the interrogation to "can avoid electric shock". "The wires with which the prisoners were interrogated are visible on the left in the wall", he noted, reports the Mirror US.
Further images disclosed by Berezovets show another supposed torture chamber where Ukrainian prisoners were allegedly crammed four to a cell, and a separate cell designated for military captives, which housed only one individual.
In the Kharkiv region, at least 10 torture chambers have been discovered where locals were imprisoned in appalling conditions, with men confined to cave-like underground cells.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed that bodies were exhumed from around 450 graves near Izyum. Investigators found that almost every victim appeared to have endured torture before their death, a truly heartbreaking discovery.
Yevheny Yenin, Ukraine's first deputy minister of internal affairs, remarked: "We continue to find bodies with signs of violent death - there are many of them.
"These include broken ribs and cracked skulls, men with bound hands, broken jaws, and severed genitalia."
Oleg Synehubov, the governor of Kharkiv region, also commented: "Some of the dead have signs of a violent death. There are bodies with tied hands and traces of torture. The deceased were also found to have explosive, shrapnel and stab wounds."
53-year-old Oleksandr Hlushko recounted to The Times his harrowing experience of being detained for five days after Russians suspected him, a former soldier, of communicating with Ukrainian partisans.
He suffered crushed ribs, was beaten repeatedly, and had the soles of his feet whipped before being discarded by the roadside from a car.
After requiring six weeks of hospital care, he now speaks with a slur. "The first time they took me away, they beat me until I was a vegetable," he disclosed.
"If it wasn't for the doctors, I wouldn't be here today."
He also claimed to have been subjected to alleged electric shocks, recounting that electrodes were fastened to his little fingers. "The second time, I almost hit the ceiling," he recounted.
Another individual reported being compelled to stand in excrement for a whole day, just hours prior to being confined in police cells, where he suffered broken ribs.
