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 occupied by the illegal military groups now. I worked as deputy director of Luhansk regional veterinary medicine hospital. On July 15, 2014, Luhansk separatist militants captured me when I was entering our hospital office. I was unreasonably accused of attempting to install technical devices for artillery spotting for the armed forces of Ukraine. They caught and searched me.
I had a photo camera with me, and on its memory card the separatists found some photos of pro-Ukrainian protests in Luhansk in which I had taken part and also some photos from the Kiev Maidan barricades. As soon as they saw those pictures they told me that they must shoot me on sight or at least shoot my legs, but they told me they wouldn't be doing it themselves and that they would have to call a special so-called “counterterrorism” unit.
They took me to the Volodymyr Dahl East Ukrainian National University, which had been occupied by the troops of separatist militants called “rapid respond team Batman”. Batman is the nickname of its leader, Oleksandr Oleksandrovich Bednov. In the basement of the dormitory, which was turned into a prison, they tortured me while demanding from me that I admit to working for the Ukrainian army.
They were beating me with their arms, using an electric stunning device, suffocating me with a bag, beating me with a piece of plastic pipe, twisting my fingers, and using a surgical saw to make cuts between the fingers of my left hand. They put me under enormous psychological pressure and poured over me an unknown chemical solution. They also poured it inside my mouth. During the next several days they were often coming to my cell, humiliating me, and unreasonably beating me with arms, legs, and sticks. They also used a hammer and other tools.
There was a person whose nickname was “Maniac”, and he was especially brutal in his torture of me. I also witnessed when this person named Maniac, who was a sadist, abused a young girl aged approximately 15 years old. There were a number of tortures and incidents that I witnessed. Another example I can provide was when a young girl was given as a gift to other militants and there was a sexual assault in front of all the people around.
Before my eyes they tortured to death a man who was drunk and not understanding where he was. He said that he was for a united Ukraine. Just for saying these words he was tortured to death. Besides these examples, I saw several corpses of the captured that they were taking out of the basement. There was an episode when, after a beating and torture, the spleen of a detainee ruptured and caused internal bleeding. His life was saved only after an urgent ectomy of the injured organ in a city hospital.
There were a lot of Russian military men among the militants of the rapid response team Batman, and they didn't hide at all that they were from Russia. Some of them were also put for a short time into cells for different transgressions, in most cases for alcohol abuse. Sometimes they were nearly unconscious because of the enormous amount of alcohol they drank.
The conditions of detention didn't meet any sanitary standards. For more than a month they kept us in almost absolute darkness.
People were captured and detained under ridiculous accusations to provide unpaid labour power and to force these people to give their money, houses, cars, and other property to the militants. Sometimes these people were involved in compulsory labour, even seriously injured people and people with broken limbs. They repeatedly used prisoners for looting and plundering trading companies and warehouses, and to carry out robberies of the houses occupied by militants.
As the information about these crimes began to spread, to hide these crimes 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 the prisoners that I belonged to were placed in another basement, which they planned to bombard with grenades on some future day.
Our release became possible only because of the conflict between a leader of the so-called Luhansk People's Republic, Plotnitsky, and the leader of the unit that was led by Batman, who planned to occupy this highest post in the so-called LPR. Leakage of the information about the mentioned crimes, and also the combination of certain circumstances, which I can't describe because of lack of time, allowed me to be free.
I was a prisoner for almost a half a year. As I speak, in such conditions on the occupied territories, hundreds of my compatriots or my friends are kept. I appeal to the progressive world not to forget about them.
Thank you. Dyakuyu.