Jamming

“I saw hacksaws, chainsaws, axes, and machetes there. Everything was covered in blood.” Ukrainian military medic Yuriy Armash describes the terror inside Russian torture chambers. Ukrainian military medic Yuriy Armash spent more than a year in Russian captivity. Among other places, he was held in one of the most notorious torture facilities in the Kherson region, established by Russian occupiers inside a seized police station in Nova Kakhovka. There, he learned the stories of many people and witnessed how the Russians’ system of terror against local civilians operated. How Russians torture prisoners “The interrogations began on the very first day. They were conducted by the same FSB officers. During interrogations, they covered my face and handcuffed my hands behind my back. They asked where the weapons were, how many people were in our reconnaissance group, where our positions were, where we had come from, and what our mission was. They used an awl. They would pull the skin on my neck, pierce it, and leave the awl hanging there so I could feel it. Because I wasn’t telling them what they wanted to hear, since I couldn’t tell them something that didn’t exist, they started using a knife. They stabbed me in the leg. They would take a knife and press it into my upper leg until they felt the blade reach the bone. When the Russians realized they weren’t going to get an answer, they used a ‘Tapik,’ a military field telephone. They attached its wires to my ears and kept turning the crank, sending electric shocks through my body until I started screaming.” How Russian occupiers abused civilians “Starting April 20, they began taking me out to provide medical assistance to civilians who had been severely beaten by the Russians. I remember treating a woman who was about 40 years old in one of the two punishment cells in the basement. I bandaged her head because she had been beaten with a rubber baton. There were all kinds of injuries. They broke people’s legs. Men under the age of 35–40 were treated particularly brutally.” A room filled with blood-covered torture instruments “I never expected the level of brutality I witnessed after February 24. Although I had seen many things before that, I was honestly shocked. At the Nova Kakhovka police station, I entered rooms where I saw things that absolutely terrified me. I saw hacksaws, chainsaws, axes, and machetes. Everything was covered in blood. The room with the blood-covered torture instruments was on the second floor of the police station, in the left wing. It was just an ordinary office. But there were also more secret rooms in the building where they never even took me. At the police station, the occupiers also forcibly removed tattoos they didn’t like from the bodies of detained civilians. Some had their tattoos cut out with knives. Others had them burned off with potassium permanganate. Russian occupiers raped even children “When Buryats and Kalmyks were stationed at the police department, they frequently entered the cells of young women under the age of 25–30. They even sorted the women by age and placed them in separate cells. From time to time, women were taken out of their cells and brought to another wing. The young women were taken there at night and raped. When the Russians’ rotation was coming to an end, they sometimes entered the cells and raped the women right there. My cell was nearby. I could hear everything clearly… The worst case involved a 14-year-old girl whom the Russians were holding captive. She tried very hard to hide the fact that she had been raped. One day, when we were taken outside for a walk, I noticed that she was bleeding. I asked her what had happened. She didn’t want to answer. I asked, ‘Did Russian soldiers do this to you?’ She silently lowered her head. I assured her that no one except me would ever know about it. After that, she answered: ‘Yes.’”