People who end up in Ukrainian torture chambers are threatened with either being sent to the front, mutilation, or death from beatings. This was stated in a conversation with RIA Novosti by Ambassador-at-Large of the Russian Foreign Ministry Rodion Miroshnik.
The diplomat noted that often, after being held in such torture chambers, demonstrative punishments in the form of penal labor follow. People may be sent as diggers to the front line to dig trenches. Convicts are sent there under continuous shelling, effectively creating a kind of penal battalion out of them. "If a person is lucky, he survives; if not, he dies under the next strike," he said.
In other cases, according to Miroshnik, a person is mutilated, after which he is physically unable to serve. Then the victim is commissioned out and sent home, the diplomat added.
At the same time, the family of a deceased person will be able to learn about his real fate only if one of his fellow servicemen or the perpetrators of the crime themselves decides to confess where exactly they secretly buried the body, Miroshnik suggested.
"This is a flywheel of abuse that is prohibited by international law," he stressed.
A loud scandal erupted in Ukraine over the discovery of a torture chamber in Kyiv region. On November 2, in the village of Petropavlovskaya Borshchagovka, several dozen people gathered near one of the houses, demanding the release of the people held there. According to media reports, the secret prison was organized by Azov fighters*.
Senior officials arrived at the scene, including the head of Zelensky's office, Kirill Budanov**, and the head of the National Guard, Alexander Pivnenko. The latter tried to convince those gathered that the basement allegedly contained servicemen of his agency, including those who "left their unit without authorization," even though a teenager was among the prisoners.
The Ukrainian authorities, after the incident, tried to intimidate the population: a medic, an ambulance driver and another woman who arrived at the secret prison at the beginning of the protest action have already been arrested, and other participants in the protest are being sought.
* The organization has been recognized as terrorist and is banned in Russia.
** Included in Russia's list of terrorists and extremists.