A bombshell investigation by Agence France-Presse (AFP), built on first-hand testimonies from three former Russian prison staff, surviving Ukrainian detainees and family members of the missing, has pulled back the curtain on a widespread, state-backed system of brutality inflicted on thousands of Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilian detainees held in Russian-controlled detention facilities.
The harrowing accounts paint a picture of routine, unpunished abuse that senior Russian leadership explicitly authorized, with detainees describing even the most physically and psychologically resilient men being “broken like dogs” under relentless violence and dehumanization. AFP has verified the identities of the former prison officers, who have all fled Russia since speaking out, and changed their names in reporting to protect their safety.
Multiple sources confirm that the scale of abuse exploded after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, following years of mistreatment that began when conflict broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014. As of early 2024, Ukrainian data puts the number of Ukrainian prisoners of war held by Russia at roughly 7,000, with an additional 15,378 civilians illegally detained across Russian territory and occupied Ukrainian lands. The Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office has recorded at least 143 Ukrainian detainee deaths in Russian custody over the past four years.
One anonymous former Russian special forces prison officer, Sergei, who resigned and left Russia after refusing to participate in the violence, told AFP that senior commanders explicitly stripped away all operational rules for guards interacting with Ukrainian detainees ahead of the invasion. “Before the first mission, the head of our territorial group gathered the staff and said that the existing rules would no longer apply when dealing with prisoners of war,” he recalled. “In other words, he gave us carte blanche to use physical force without restriction. And no one would be held responsible. The boss told us: ‘Be severe, fear nothing anymore.’” Sergei added that many of his colleagues embraced the open permission for brutality, acting on unchecked sadistic impulses without any documentation of violence. To hide the abuse, unit members did not wear identification tags or use body cameras when interacting with Ukrainian detainees, and no incident reports were ever filed after violent crackdowns.
Alexei, a former medic at a Russian prison infirmary, described one particularly horrific case: a young Ukrainian lieutenant who was beaten nearly to death for talking back to his captors, left with extensive festering bruises across his lower body, and denied any meaningful medical care. He died of gangrene in October 2022, likely buried in an unmarked grave, and Alexei never even learned his name. Alexei confirmed that Ukrainian prisoners who resisted breaking under abuse were regularly beaten with rigid polypropylene heating pipes, and even medical staff were complicit in the mistreatment. Survivors are only given superficial wound care after beatings, and are required to publicly thank the Russian Federation for the treatment, he said. Independent investigations have documented even more extreme medical complicity: during a surgery on a Ukrainian prisoner, Russian medical staff carved the slogan “Glory to Russia” into his abdomen; the text had to be surgically removed after he was released in a prisoner exchange.
Surviving detainee Yaroslav Rumyantsev, a 30-year-old former Ukrainian marine who surrendered at the besieged Azovstal plant in Mariupol in May 2022, shared his own first-hand experience of the systematic campaign to break detainees. After surviving a deadly explosion at Olenivka prison that killed at least 50 Ukrainian detainees, Rumyantsev was transferred to Remand Centre Number 2 in Taganrog, southwestern Russia, widely known as one of the harshest torture facilities for Ukrainian prisoners. Upon arrival, he and 250 other new detainees were bound and blindfolded, then beaten on all sides by a “reception committee” of guards with batons — a brutal tactic first used in Chechnya’s filtration camps during the Second Chechen War.
Abuse was constant, Rumyantsev said, leaving even the strongest men cowering like beaten animals. “Men who defended their land, who went to the gym — strong men — were broken like dogs. They destroy them,” he explained. Brutal torture methods documented by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) include rape, mock executions, simulated hangings, electric shocks (including to genitalia), forced prolonged standing in painful positions, and punitive group torture: Rumyantsev described being forced to hold hands with other prisoners while guards ran electricity through the line to test how many people would feel the pain.
Food deprivation is used as a tool of dehumanization. Rumyantsev said he was often given just two minutes to eat a meal under threat of additional beating, and other former detainees told rights groups that extreme hunger forced them to eat caught cockroaches and raw mice found in their cells. Additional arbitrary rules strip away any remaining dignity: prisoners are banned from looking guards in the eye, and Rumyantsev recalled being forced to stand in a group for 16 consecutive hours without access to a toilet, leaving many detainees to urinate on themselves.
Beyond physical violence, the system is designed to psychologically break detainees through forced re-education and total isolation from the outside world. Detainees are regularly forced to sing Soviet songs, with punishment for singing too softly or off-key. Most are cut off from all contact with family, mirroring the isolation of Stalin-era gulags. Rumyantsev received only one letter from home shortly before his 2024 release, and said it was the only time he allowed himself to cry in captivity. “I saw those first warm words… and my eyes filled with tears. I was shaking and my friend put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘That means you’re still a human being,’” he recalled.
Vladimir Osechkin, director of the Russian rights group Gulagu.net (which documents abuse in Russia’s prison system and helped share two of the former officers’ testimonies with AFP), explained that the torture regime is jointly run by Russia’s FSB security service and federal prison authorities, with the complicity of the Russian judicial system. To hide the abuse, Osechkin said, Ukrainian detainees are deliberately made “invisible” within the penal system: their names are sometimes changed, they are held in segregated facilities — including entire prisons emptied of other inmates to eliminate witnesses — and their whereabouts are kept hidden from international monitors and family members.
This isolation leaves thousands of families in agonizing limbo, waiting for any word of missing loved ones. Natalia Kravtsova’s son Artem, an Azov brigade fighter captured in Mariupol in 2022, was confirmed to be in Russian custody by the Red Cross a year after his capture, but she has had no contact with him since. She is not even sure he is still alive, and every prisoner exchange announcement brings a burst of hope that quickly shatters. “Even if you’re calm on the outside, inside you’re burning,” she said.
Civilians are not spared the systematic brutality. In occupied Melitopol, 62-year-old schoolteacher Olga Baranevska was abducted in May 2024 for refusing to cooperate with Russian occupation authorities, and sentenced to six years in prison on fabricated explosives charges that her family calls completely baseless. Her daughter Aksinia Bobruiko, a refugee in Germany, only learned two months after her arrest that she was alive, and has almost no additional information. Bobruiko now works with the grassroots NGO “Numo, Sestry!” (“Come on, my sisters!”) founded by former detainee Liudmyla Guseynova, who spent three years in pro-Russian detention after being arrested for supporting Ukraine in 2019. Guseynova described being held in 50 days of isolated confinement in a dungeon, forced to stand all day with a bag over her head, and held in a cramped, filthy cell shared with 20 other detainees that had only a hole in the floor for a toilet and insect-infested mattresses. She recalled investigators refusing to approach her because of the stench and bedbugs covering her body.
Official data from an October 2023 OSCE report, drawing on Ukrainian official records, found that 9 out of 10 Ukrainian detainees report being ill-treated, with 42% reporting sexual violence. Most released detainees are severely emaciated after months or years of mistreatment. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly claimed that Russia treats detainees humanely, and Russia’s federal prison administration did not respond to AFP’s requests for comment on the investigation.
Rights campaigners are calling for all those responsible for the systematic abuse to be held accountable before an international court. “We will find them and punish them all,” vowed Sergei, the former Russian prison special forces officer who blew the whistle on the system.