Russia's torture centre: Ukrainians tell of shocks, blows and waterboarding

Ukrainians tell of shocks, blows and waterboarding

- Manisha Ganguly, Shaun Walker, Pjotr Sauer, Tetyana Nikolayenko, Anton Naumliuk, Artem Mazhulin and Lucy Swan

Some weeks after being detained as she attempted to leave a Russian-occupied part of Ukraine in January 2023, Yelyzaveta Shylyk was given a polygraph test. As her interrogators attached the lie detector's wires to her, they calmly told her what would happen if she failed the test: "You'll go to a place where you'll regret being born."

That place, she would later find out, had a name: Sizo No 2, a pre-trial detention centre in the southern Russian city of Taganrog.

Before the full-scale invasion in February 2022, the facility held juvenile inmates and mothers with young children, but was repurposed as a torture centre for Ukrainian captives. It has since emerged as the darkest link in a network of detention centres across Russia and occupied Ukraine.

Guards subjected not just combatants but also civilians to violence and torture. The exact number of civilians is impossible to ascertain, but the Ukrainian parliament's commissioner for human rights, Dmytro Lubinets, said that as of April 2024 the number registered as having disappeared stood at 16,000.

Most are in legal limbo and have not been charged with any crime. Their locations are often undisclosed, although information can filter out via released prisoners of war. Ukraine believes they are held at up to 180 sites.

The Guardian and its reporting partners have identified the systematic use of torture at 29 of these sites – 18 in Russia and 11 in Russian-occupied territories. The most common methods include electric shocks, waterboarding, mock executions, blows with wooden and metal hammers, and beatings on the same body part, alongside bizarre humiliations such as being tied up with tape and then sat on as "human furniture".