[Regnum] Law enforcement agencies and the Investigative Committee of Russia are working with residents of Avdievka to collect information about secret prisons and torture chambers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Ambassador at Large of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for crimes of the Kiev regime Rodion Miroshnik said on February 20. According to him, working with people who leave the city is necessary in order to accurately identify such places and obtain documentary evidence.
“We know that there were secret torture chambers there - places where people were dragged on politically motivated charges or suspicions,” the diplomat emphasized.
Also, according to him, the investigation will have to study preliminary information about secret burials in Avdievka and the consequences of torture. Speaking about the methods of obtaining evidence of the Kyiv crimes, Miroshnik explained that as Avdiivka is demined and civilian specialists open access there, the territory in which the investigation is being conducted will expand, and that after testimony is taken, an inspection of potential sites of criminal activity of the Armed Forces of Ukraine will begin.
Avdievka is a city in the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR). It is located approximately 10 km northwest of Donetsk. From there, Ukrainian troops also shelled nearby Donetsk and Makeyevka. By the beginning of 2022, 31,700 people lived there. The head of the Donetsk People's Republic Denis Pushilin previously announced a huge number of recorded crimes against the civilian population of Avdiivka by the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU).
TORTURE AND OTHER ATROCITIES OF THE UKRAINIAN ARMED FORCES
The Kiev authorities have been demonstrating a criminal attitude towards the civilian population since 2014. Since that time, only militants of the Ukrainian nationalist battalion "Aidar" have kidnapped at least one hundred civilians in the Lugansk People's Republic.
“They kidnapped people, kept them in basements, [demanded] ransoms, beat them, took away their cars. Yes, they did whatever they wanted to people,” said one of the victims.
The fact that Kiev nationalists detained and tortured people on the territory of the Lugansk People's Republic is evidenced by the Aidar base, converted into a torture prison, discovered in October 2022 on the territory of the Starobelsky district of the LPR near the village of Polovkino. According to the Investigative Committee, at least 30 detainees were kept there, and at least seven of them, unable to withstand the torture, died or were killed.
A representative of the security forces informed journalists at the end of May 2023 that the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) had created torture chambers for violence against people who collaborated with the Russian authorities in the Dneprovsky and Komsomolsky district police departments.
In particular, in the torture chamber of the Dneprovsky District Department of Internal Affairs, local businessman Vladimir Malina was brutally beaten, and the next day he died in the cell, RIA Novosti wrote, citing a source in law enforcement agencies. According to him, in order to hide the fact of the man’s death, two workers of the Russian Humanitarian Center, Roman Gavrilyuk and Igor Gurov, who were detained with him, were tortured for three days and forced to write an explanation that Vladimir Malina was released along with them.
The agency's interlocutor also stated that in another police department - Komsomolsky - the SBU attracted foreigners "with English, Polish and Georgian speech" to torture the detainees.
AZOV PEOPLE
One of the most bloodthirsty Ukrainian military formations was the Azov group, which on August 2, 2022, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation recognized as a terrorist and extremist organization, completely banning its activities in Russia.
The group's militants tortured and killed civilians, including small children. The militants also mined civilian objects, the investigation proved.
The chairman of the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, Alexander Bastrykin, informed about the torture facility of “Azovites” at the Mariupol airport in early March 2023 during a working trip to the Kherson region.
“The most terrible torture facility of our time was in Mariupol, and the Azov militants gave it the unusual name “Library.” The people who were subjected to the most sophisticated tortures and executions there were called “books” by the Nazis, recalled Alexander Dyukov, director of the Historical Memory Foundation and leading researcher at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, at the end of December 2022.
“At the Mariupol airport there was a notorious torture prison with all the corresponding paraphernalia: ditches with the bodies of the tortured, punishment cells and chainsaws. This is not the Middle Ages, but neo-Nazism,” Permanent Representative Vasily Nebenzya emphasized back in March 2022 at a UN Security Council meeting on the humanitarian situation in Ukraine.
The fact that the militants of the Azov gang were mostly engaged not in combat operations, but in robberies and propaganda of Nazi ideology during their stay in Mariupol, was previously told by captured militant Sergei Rusinov. He stated that he saw with his own eyes how women and children were killed, calling them “enemy dwarf scouts.”
“We were given illegal orders to commit crimes,” noted another prisoner of war from this unit, Andrei Chernyakov, to RIA Novosti in August 2023.
In mid-February 2024, a brigade consisting of Azov militants was transferred to Avdievka. But after becoming the 3rd assault brigade after “rebranding,” the “Azovites” escaped from the super-fortified Avdeevka coking plant.