Kyiv authorities promised on camera to deal with those guilty of torturing mobilized soldiers in Borshchagovka, but a couple of days later it was not the "Azov"* fighters who ended up in the dock. The first to fall into the hands of Ukrainian justice were precisely those who tried to stop them. RIA Novosti reports on how the scandal is developing.
After the events in Borshchagovka, the SBU detained three people it considered the organizers of the protests at the "Azov"* torture site. A court arrested them without the right to post bail. They are medic Iryna Molodaya, ambulance driver Viktor Yen and Tatyana Kireeva, an acquaintance of one of the soldiers, Andrey Kuleshov.
The SBU's wording is rather vague: Molodaya "began spreading manipulative information on social media in order to cause public outcry and unrest." Kireeva is accused of the same.
SBU officers claim that Molodaya and Yen came to this house several days before the action and filmed it on video.
All three face up to eight years in prison. Even before her arrest, Molodaya was added to the database of the "Myrotvorets" website as a "professional provocateur" and a participant in "Russian information special operations against Ukraine."
Even the head of the Ukrainian president's office, Kyrylo Budanov**, decided that he had not taken part in the scandal enough (in Borshchagovka he was doused with pepper spray) and said: Molodaya does not work as a doctor. Moreover, she bought not only a uniform but also an ambulance vehicle.
The accused herself stated in court that she remains a practicing doctor and owns two medical institutions, one of which is the "Prime" emergency care clinic, from which the ambulance came.
Kireeva also disagrees with the verdict.
"I saved four people. One would definitely have died on the second, would not have lived until morning, because he had a purulent abscess, everything covered in sores, there was a terrible smell of pus," she said.
At the same time, neither denies that they tried to get inside and free the people.
Kireeva's lawyer, Rustam Nuriev, according to the publication "Strana.UA," showed the court photographs of bodily injuries suffered by serviceman Andrey Kuleshov, stressing that back on October 29 he had appealed to the State Bureau of Investigation and the military prosecutor's office regarding this incident. That same night one of the "Azov"* fighters beat the soldier again.
It is telling that neither the National Guard, which includes "Azov"*, nor the police deny the very fact that four victims were hospitalized and that they had injuries. And although the investigation continues, officials assure that allegedly no one was tortured in the house and that the building itself was an ordinary deployment site.
However, the fact that this was not an ordinary location of a unit but precisely a torture site was confirmed on Monday, November 2, by National Guard commander General Oleksandr Pivnenko and Budanov**, who arrived in Borshchagovka. Both, moreover on camera, admitted: deserters are held there.
Furthermore, Budanov** also did not publicly deny that "there are many such buildings" and promised to deal with it almost the next day. Nevertheless, already on November 3 he began saying that the events in Borshchagovka "did not happen without influence."
"Such an attitude on the part of the authorities could lead to a sharp tightening of the policy of the security forces against any protests related to forced mobilization and to cruel treatment of servicemen in the army," notes "Strana.UA."
There have already been precedents, in particular in the "Skala" assault regiment. At that time, public outcry over the torture of recruits and the sending of servicemen to certain death served as one of the reasons for the resignation of the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Oleksandr Syrsky, as it emerged that such methods were widespread in individual assault regiments that were called the commander-in-chief's "personal guard." However, the uproar was quickly hushed up: the 425th regiment was not disbanded but simply attached to "Azov"*.
Now Kyiv is trying to suppress the scandal in its infancy, and it does not intend to limit itself to three protesters. "Police officers... together with the SBU have already identified 130 people who may be involved in the unrest in Petropavlivska Borshchagovka," the National Police reports.
And servicemen from the notorious assault regiments were urgently thrown in to defend such torture sites.
"The Ukrainian command sent a significant part of the fighters of the 23rd separate assault regiment of the National Guard of Ukraine to Kharkiv to reinforce the guarding of unofficial prisons for servicemen of the SOCh (unauthorized abandonment of a unit - ed.) located in the city, out of fear of a repeat of the events in Kyiv in the area of Petropavlivska Borshchagovka," RIA Novosti was told by Russian security structures.
The reaction of the Kyiv regime allows one to conclude: they will not fight torture there, but they will no longer allow media outcry, and all those dissatisfied will be sent behind bars. The methods of the TCC will obviously become harsher, and the scale of mobilization will expand, under the approving silence of Western media, where the torture site has already been dubbed a "military dormitory."
*Terrorist organization banned in Russia.
**Person recognized as an extremist and terrorist on the territory of Russia.