As Olekdsndr Fayizov shines his torch down the stairs leading to the basement of a railway station, about 30 bloody ovals appear on the wall. These are the marks made when Russian interrogators bashed prisoners’ heads against the concrete.Olekdsndr Fayizov, 41, shows where Russian soldiers beat prisoners’ heads against the wall in the basement of the Trostyanets railway station.This is the anatomy of the torture cell: in the centre of a tiny, darkened room, there stands a wooden desk.
“I had my ass shot through,” Barannyk says, before pulling down his pants to show us the hole in his right buttock. “Three ribs broken, injured forehead. They shot over my ear. There’s even a bullet hole in the collar of my jacket.”After a man named Mykola dared to express disappointment with the prisoners’ treatment, Russian special forces kicked him to death, Fayizov says.
After Mykola died, there were five prisoners left in the room. On March 25, after days of noise, Fayizov says all of a sudden there was silence. “I mean they are not humans, I don’t know,” he says. “How can a human being shit beside the place where he sleeps? It’s awful. I just refuse to understand. They have no self-respect at all.”
Nadiya Tereshchenko, 65, in the garden of her home in Yahidne. north-east of Kyiv, where the entire village were locked in a school basement by Russian soldiers.“They wouldn’t let us bury the dead,” she says. “Before dying, the people went mad. They started talking funny and hallucinating.”