Andrew E. Kramer
July 22, 2016
Ukraine’s Security Services and Rebels Are Said to Be Equals in Torture
MOSCOW — A report by two leading human rights groups released on Thursday accusesUkraine’s Western-backed security services of practicing abuse and torture in a manner similar to that of the rebel groups they are fighting.
In the report about disappearances and torture in the Ukraine war, titled “You Don’t Exist,” Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International document harrowing abuse by both sides, including waterboarding and the use of electrical shocks.
Ukraine has been battling Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east since 2014, with fighting grinding on despite a cease-fire. This week, seven Ukrainian soldiers died in a single day of fighting.
The front line zigzags through several towns, so that worries about spies and surreptitious artillery spotters among the civilian population run high in the armies of both sides, and abuse follows, the report said.
“People in eastern Ukraine who are being seized and hidden away by the warring sides are at the mercy of their captors,” Tanya Lokshina, a researcher with Human Rights Watch and one of the authors of the report, said in a statement.
“It is never legal or justified to seize people off the streets, cut them off from contact with family and lawyers, and beat and abuse them,” she said.
Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency, the Security Service of Ukraine, denies illegally detaining suspects in the conflict. And yet as recently as May, it refused to allow a United Nations delegation investigating reports of torture access to sites where suspects were alleged to be held illegally.
During the two-year conflict, much attention had fallen on the abuses of Russian-backed rebels, who routinely rounded up and held in basements civilians expressing pro-Ukrainian views, freeing them after a ransom had been paid or in prisoner exchanges.
The report said the Ukrainian security services may have created an “exchange fund” or “currency” of detainees detainees, to trade for supporters in rebel areas, driving the abuse. Nobody wants to be left empty-handed during prisoner exchanges.
“This gives rise to serious concern that both sides may be detaining civilians to have ‘currency’ for potential exchanges,” the report said. This practice could constitute hostage taking, a war crime, it said.
The rights groups detailed nine instances of detainee abuse on each side, and in nearly all 18 cases the men and women in custody were either freed in a prisoner exchange or at one point objects of negotiation.
The Ukrainian domestic intelligence agency probably runs unacknowledged detention centers at sites throughout eastern Ukraine, the report said, in Kharkiv, Kramatorsk, Izyum and Mariupol.
One man whom the investigators interviewed, identified only by his first name, Artem, recounted being detained by the Ukrainian authorities, handcuffed to a metal rod on a ceiling and beaten, with demands to tell “everything.”
He was also shocked with bare electrical wires on his back and wires were applied to his genitals, although it was unclear whether the current was turned on. He also described being suffocated with a wet mop, or waterboarded.
He was eventually traded for a detainee held on the rebel side. The report detailed similar mistreatment by the Russian-backed security services of the two rebel governments, known as the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.
Svetlana Rozova, a Ukrainian psychologist who works with detainees freed from rebel jails, said in an interview that victims emerge with deep emotional scars. During incarceration by rebel groups, beatings, mock executions and forced menial labor, like digging trenches, are common.
Recovery is harder when these detainees learn that they were held, sometimes for months, only for the sake of padding out an exchange deal.
“They didn’t understand why it has happened to them,” she said. “They just wanted to run away, and forget all of this, but they won’t be able to forget it soon. They are mentally broken.”
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