Former Inmates Speak About Horrors Of Ukraine's Mariupol 'Library' Secret Prison

Electrical and chainsaw torture, a night in a pit with the bodies of those who have already died from torture: it is hard to believe that these are not fantasies from a horror movie, but a very real abuse that citizens of one country, Ukraine, are putting each other through in the 21st century

DONETSK/GENEVA (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 17th July, 2019) Electrical and chainsaw torture, a night in a pit with the bodies of those who have already died from torture: it is hard to believe that these are not fantasies from a horror movie, but a very real abuse that citizens of one country, Ukraine, are putting each other through in the 21st century.

Sputnik obtained documents and testimonies about what is happening in Ukrainian secret prisons, where the soldiers of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) and those who are only suspected of sympathy for separatists end up.

At a press conference in Moscow in March, an ex-officer of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), Vasyl Prozorov, told reporters about a secret prison at the Mariupol airport, the so-called "library." Those who had been jailed there confirmed Prozorov's information.

"When I saw pictures of this corridor [which Prozorov showed] on tv, my hair stood on end. These plastic doors ... I sit and whisper: 'Mom, this is my cell,'" Mariupol resident Tatiana Ganzha recalled.

The corridor is bright, there are many plastic doors, she said.

"A terrible place," Ganzha concluded.

She spent ten days at the Mariupol airport and did not think that she would ever see her prison from the outside, or even on TV. Ganzha was a member of the Communist Party of Ukraine, which is now banned in this country. She participated in protest rallies in Mariupol, and then in the referendum on the future of the Donetsk region, which took place on May 11, 2014. In October 2014, Ukrainian National Guard's Azov Battalion officers detained her, and Ganzha had no idea that she was blacklisted as a separatist.

"I spent exactly ten days at the airport, from October 30 to the evening of November 8. There are even notches in one of the cells," she recalled.

The prisoners marked days on the walls of the cells to keep themselves from going crazy. Tatiana saw seven or eight elephants on the wall of her cell: someone creative counted the days in prison in such a way.

When Ganzha got out, she discussed these elephants with other companions in misfortune and met the woman who painted them, Natalia Myakotu.

"So I was in your cell, I saw these elephants," she told Natalia.

Ganzha describes everything that happened at the airport as "a real hell, a place of death."

"I cannot express all the horrors. The bridge of my nose is smashed and I am deaf in my left ear. It hurts me to remember. I will not tell the whole story ... But there was a boy from Ukrainian Armed Forces who walked me to the toilet along that corridor, and he told me that 'a girl was beaten to death here two days before you, her name was also Tatiana,'" Ganzha said.

The torturers constantly threatened Tatiana with a pit or a ditch where they threw the dead bodies. They hinted that she will also be dead soon and will join them or promised psychological torture to her (when they throw the still-living prisoner to the dead).

"As far as I understood from their conversations, there is a ditch covered with lime," Ganzha specified.

Tatiana said that people had been going missing even before her captivity, and answering the question of how many people were buried there, she said that there was "a lot."

"I heard that there were a lot of people buried also at an agricultural station. There are hundreds, but that is just in my opinion," she added.

She was taken from the airport to the SBU for investigative actions only on November 8, 2014, and was released on December 26, 2014, as part of a prisoner swap between Ukraine and the DPR. Since then, she lives in Donetsk in one of the hostels for refugees from the territory controlled by Kiev. According to her, her house in Mariupol was looted by Azov.

"These fellows from Azov have taken everything from my house: the heating system, windows, doors," Ganzha continued.

Prozorov also said that members of the "volunteer battalions" sent any household equipment home as a trophy, even microwaves with old sandwiches still in them.

Olga Seletskaya was detained in the city center by Azov on August 29, 2014. She spent 24 hours in the secret prison, after which she was transferred to the SBU. The protocol was issued on August 30, and moreover, according to the document, Seletskaya was allegedly taken off a bus in the suburbs of Mariupol.

"They do not process you there [at the airport]. They threaten, they can bring your family, your husband, children, and torture them right in front of you. They intimidate and break people mentally and physically. But when they bring you to the SBU, then they document everything ... as if they have just detained you. For example, as in my case, they allegedly took me off a bus, and it is unknown where I was the day before that, as if I had vanished in space, disappeared," Seletskaya said.

According to her, one of the most popular torture methods is to drown a person in a barrel or to torture with a wet cloth. A cloth is placed on the face of a person lying down and water gets poured over the cloth, so the person starts to choke.

"Water enters the lungs and you lose consciousness. They were interested in information about weapons, where money is located," she recalled.

Olga still remembers the nicknames of two torturers: the Butcher and the Doctor.

"These were sophisticated torture methods. I communicated with other victims. They called us 'books,' and the place where we were held was called 'library.' They told me about brutal torture, about what was happening there ... I saw many of those who went through the Mariupol airport in the SBU basement ... People were severely beaten, maimed. I heard that they never returned after interrogations," she said.

Olga was also impressed with Prozorov's press conference; she recognized the former SBU officer and the prisoners whose photos he had shown.

"I remember the man in this photo. I saw him in the building of the Security Service of Ukraine when we were interrogated. I am sure that this is him," Seletskaya said, pointing at one of Prozorov's photos.

SBU OFFICER TURNS OUT TO BE A FRIEND

A well-known journalist in Donetsk, the editor-in-chief of the Municipalnaya Gazeta, Elena Bloha, also recognized Prozorov. On August 2, 2014, she was detained at a checkpoint near the village of Manhush in the suburbs of Mariupol: the journalist with her son and a driver was driving to Crimea along the usual road, without even thinking that the road was controlled by Azov, and Bloha herself had long been blacklisted for coverage of events in Donetsk.

"I was shocked when I saw Prozorov's press conference, after all, it was him who participated in my detention! I remembered him very well," Elena said emotionally.

She described those events, as well as her impressions of the airport in her book "90 Days in Captivity," although it is available only electronically. The author, still not knowing that Prozorov was a "friend," said he had the face of a bulldog.

"One from the capture group, a rather strong middle-aged man with a face of a bulldog, clapped his SBU document jacket right in front of my eyes, saying that everything was fine and I just had to drive with them," Bloha wrote in her book.

Then the SBU officers took her to Mariupol airport.

"We drove into the territory through several checkpoints, which were fenced not only with sandbags but also with antitank hedgehogs with barbed wire. Armed people in masks stood at the posts and let us in only after our guards showed their 'badges.' Fighters in camouflage are a common sight for residents of Donetsk, but these were particularly aggressive. We were also not very welcome at the airport itself. There was already a whole unit of men dressed in camouflage uniforms and 'balaclavas.' We heard screams and blows, and it seemed that someone was getting beaten up," the book read.

Bloha even managed to get into the infamous refrigerators where the prisoners were kept. The room she was in was small, white-tiled, with one chair and no ventilation. Her cellmate said that she was taken for an "execution" twice, seeking the confession that she was the DPR's saboteur.

"They promised to bury me in a trench and said that no one will find me if I do not agree to work with them," Bloha wrote in her book, quoting her cellmate.

Her son also had some unpleasant experience: he was put into the men's cell, where there were eight more people.

"Some of them, according to my son, were severely beaten. One had his broken ribs stuck out, and another had broken legs ... I do not know what kind of people they were and I can only guess what happened to them next, but one thing was clear: that these guys can really go missing, as it happens with many who were captured by such 'volunteer' battalions," the book read.

Everything that is happening in the Mariupol airport, as well as in other secret prisons in Ukraine and the self-proclaimed republics, has constantly come under the attention of the United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine and was recorded in the mission's reports.

As the head of the mission, Fiona Frazer, told Sputnik that over five years the mission documented several hundred cases of arbitrary detention and/or incommunicado detention and related human rights violations and abuses, such as torture and ill-treatment by both the Ukrainian government and by armed groups of the self-proclaimed republics.

In particular, the mission documented 16 cases of arbitrary detention and/or interrogation of persons at the airport in Mariupol. According to Frazer, they all date back to 2014-2015, and the first half of 2016. The shortest period of detention was several hours, while the longest detention lasted for one month.

She added that the mission had not received any data on the "library" after 2016, but Sputnik has a document at its disposal which proves that the prison existed at least until the end of 2018.

DPR PROSECUTOR GENERAL'S OFFICE INVESTIGATES 9 CRIMINAL CASES

As the DPR's Prosecutor General's Office told Sputnik, its investigative department is investigating nine criminal cases on "the use of prohibited means and methods of warfare."

The Prosecutor General's Office received appeals from civilians on the facts of cruel treatment of civilians by the Ukrainian law enforcement agencies. All nine suffered from the illegal actions of the SBU officers who used torture during interrogations of suspects: electrical torture, suffocation with a plastic bag, water torture.

According to the head of the department for investigating crimes against peace and security in the Prosecutor General's Office, Alexander Potapenko, the investigation department is currently trying to identify the SBU personnel who were involved in torture.

Prozorov said at the press conference that there was a secret prison in the Mariupol airport, the "library," where the "books" were kept this cynical nickname was given to prisoners from the DPR militia and to ordinary citizens suspected of separatism. They were tortured there in order to force confessions.

The prisoners were kept in two non-working refrigerators, which seemed well equipped for it as there was no furniture in them, and the airtight doors closed, keeping the "rooms" cold.

Prozorov showed photographs of nine prisoners from the "library". These were people of different ages, from a teenager to old men, and all of them had traces of severe beatings. Sputnik found those who identified some of the "books."

According to Prozorov, there were secret burial places somewhere at the airport for those who did not survive the torture and those who were simply killed by sadistic guards.

The militants of the infamous Azov battalion, under the auspices of the SBU, were running the "library." As a rule, Azov officers did all the dirty work, and the SBU officers documented the confessions.

It is worth noting that there is little evidence of all these tortures from the other side, as Ukraine is not ready to investigate its own war crimes, although the change of government gives some hope.

Results of forensic examinations that the "books" went through while in captivity and afterward are among such evidence. Some of them spent several months in hospitals after their captivity. Four DPR militiamen who have been in the Mariupol detention facility for almost five years were even able to take legal action and the military prosecutor's office of Mariupol opened a criminal case on torture.

Another important piece of evidence is the time-lag in the prisoners' documents. Several days or even weeks passed between the actual detention and the time when they were officially processed. At the same time, their capture was often videotaped by the Azov battalion and even documented in SBU press releases. During the "grey" period, the prisoners were tortured, and this was how they were prepared for official interrogations by the SBU.