Ukraine alleges systematic torture of prisoners held by Russia at U.N. meeting

New York, United States. Former Ukrainian detainees and Ukrainian officials accused Russia on Monday of systematically torturing prisoners of war and civilian detainees, holding captives incommunicado and subjecting them to beatings, electric shocks and sexual abuse.

Russia rejected the allegations at an informal U.N. Security Council meeting, calling them a disinformation campaign and accusing Ukraine of abusing Russian prisoners.

Testimony from former detainee

Khuan Alberto Levya Garsiya, an active member of the Ukrainian military, said Russian captors subjected him to every imaginable form of torture during 1,183 days in captivity.

“Yes … I was tortured,” he told reporters after the meeting. He said he endured verbal and physical abuse, daily beatings, electrocution, excessive exercise in freezing temperatures and sexual abuse, aimed at breaking detainees mentally.

Garsiya said he survived, but two of his friends were beaten to death in detention centres in the Donetsk region. He said prisoners were held in overcrowded barracks without adequate conditions, where almost all prisoners of war had dysentery and many were starving.

A Ukrainian with a Cuban father, Garsiya said guards singled him out because of his Latino name, accusing him of being a mercenary and an American spy.

Detention facilities and prisoners

Crimean Tatar activist Leniie Umerova, who was released in a prisoner exchange in 2024, said she was detained while trying to visit her seriously ill father in Crimea.

She said she was transferred through seven detention facilities in what she described as a “carousel of repression” and accused Russia of using torture against Ukrainians in captivity.

Oleg Gushin of the Ukrainian government’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War said Ukrainian prisoners had been killed and tortured in detention. He said Kyiv had identified more than 300 detention sites in Russia and occupied Ukrainian territory.

More than 9,000 Ukrainians have been returned through prisoner exchanges, but thousands remain in Russian captivity, Gushin said.

Russian response

Russia’s Deputy U.N. Representative Maria Zabolotskaya called the allegations a disinformation campaign. She alleged that Russian prisoners held in Ukraine had been subjected to torture, degradation and moral and physical abuse.