Honourable ladies and gentlemen, my name is Oleksandr Gryshchenko. Before July 2014 I lived and worked in the city of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, which is currently occupied by illegal armed groups. I was working as assistant manager of the Luhansk regional veterinary hospital, and on July 15, 2014, I was detained by the Luhansk separatist militia while attempting to enter the building where our hospital’s office was located. Without any justification, I was accused of attempting to install artillery fire spotting devices for the armed forces of Ukraine. They apprehended and searched me.
I had a camera with me, on the memory card of which the separatists found photographs of pro-Ukrainian protest rallies in Luhansk in which I had taken part, as well as some photos of the barricades in the Kyiv Maidan. As soon as they saw those pictures, the separatists said that I should be put before a firing squad on the spot or at the very least they should send bullets through my legs, but, they said, this was going to be handled by the special so-called “counter-terrorism unit”, which they summoned immediately.
They took me to the Volodymyr Dahl East Ukrainian National University, which had been occupied at the time by a unit of the separatist militia called the Batman Rapid Response Team. “Batman” is the nickname of its commander, Oleksandr Oleksandrovych Bednov. In the dormitory basement, which they had converted into a prison, they subjected me to torture, demanding that I confess to working for the Ukrainian army.
They punched me and kicked me, used an electric stunner on me, strangled me with a noose, beat me with a length of plastic pipe, broke my fingers, and used a surgical saw to make cuts between the fingers of my left hand. They put me under enormous psychological pressure and poured a solution of an unknown chemical over me, also pouring it into my mouth. In the following days the separatists frequently came to my cell, humiliated me, punched and kicked me, and beat me with clubs for no reason at all. These abuses resulted in numerous hematomas, bruises, and broken ribs.
As a tool for beating, they also used a hard rubber hammer designed for auto body repair or for laying paving tiles. It was with just such a hammer that this unit’s staff torturer nicknamed “the Maniac” broke my breastbone during a regular beating.
During my time in this basement I witnessed cruel, severe abuse and torture, and murders of the prisoners. In this basement I saw for the first time in my life the colour of human flesh, which was visible in wounds.
I have also witnessed several rapes. Let me give you an example. On the orders of the separatist nicknamed the Maniac, a young girl of about 15 was sent as a “gift” to the other gunmen on the front lines, to satisfy their sexual needs, and they took her there more than once.
Before my eyes, they tortured to death a man who, being in the state of alcoholic intoxication and not understanding where he was, said that he was “for the united Ukraine”. Aside from this incident, I saw several corpses of detainees being carried out of the basement. There was an episode when, after beatings and torture, one of the detainees ended up with a ruptured spleen with internal bleeding. His life was saved only after urgent surgery to remove the injured organ at the city hospital.
I am aware of a case of a prisoner being forced by threats to record a video in which he pleaded guilty to engaging in the so-called “sabotage and intelligence operation”. This video later showed up on Russian TV.
Among the members of the Batman RRT militia unit there were many Russian military men, and they didn’t even try to hide the fact that they were from Russia. Some of them were also put in the cells briefly for different transgressions, in most cases for alcohol abuse. Sometimes they were brought in nearly unconscious because of the enormous amount of alcohol they had consumed.
The prisoners’ conditions of detention did not meet any sanitary standards whatsoever. For more than a month they kept us in almost complete darkness.
People were grabbed and thrown in jail based on absurd accusations, just to have enough free labour and also to force these people to give the militants their money, houses, cars, and other property. Sometimes they took people with serious injuries, such as broken limbs, and made them work.
They often used prisoners for looting and plundering, for robbing trading company warehouses, and for renovating the buildings appropriated by the militia.
In order to conceal their crimes, information about which had begun to spread, Batman ordered the physical destruction of the prisoners who had stayed in the basement for a long time and had witnessed these crimes.
A group of prisoners, which also included me, was taken to another basement, which they were planning to bombard with grenades in a few days.
Our liberation became possible only because of the conflict between the leader of the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic, Ihor Plotnytskyi, and the unit commander, Batman—that is, Bednov—who had been planning to keep this post, the highest in the so-called LPR, for himself, as well as because of leaked information about the crimes referred to above, and also because of a fortunate coincidence, which I cannot tell you about in detail because of a lack of time.
Overall, I spent nearly six months in captivity. As of this date, hundreds of my compatriots are held in similar conditions in the occupied territories.
I appeal to the progressive world not to forget about them, to demand that the Kremlin release them, and not to curtail the sanctions against the Russian Federation, which is fully responsible for the events taking place on the occupied territories in eastern Ukraine.
Thank you. Dyakuyu.