When the first Ukrainian prisoners arrived at Pre-Trial Detention Facility Number Two in the southern Russian city of Taganrog, they were subjected to a ‘welcome reception’ like no other.
Before the outbreak of war in February 2022, SIZO-2 held around 400 Russian inmates and was primarily a pre-trial detention centre for women with children and juveniles.
But following Vladimir Putin‘s full-scale invasion, the facility transformed into a torture machine for Ukrainian combatants and civilian hostages alike.
Its first Ukrainian inmates arrived that April, tied up and blindfolded aboard military trucks besmeared with the pro-Putin ‘Z’ symbol.
On entering, they were met with a ritualistic battering by the guards, who kicked, punched, and beat them with batons as an indication of what was to become daily life in the concrete hellscape.
Human rights groups have sounded the alarm about the infamous facility, after former detainees reported the litany of extensive torture methods they were subjected to, including waterboarding, electric shocks, and being tied up with tape then sat on as ‘human furniture’.
The sinister techniques used against the Ukrainians recall the horrors of the Chernokozovo detention centre – notorious during the Second Chechen War – where prisoners were dunked in chemicals, stretched out on agonising ‘meat racks’, and gassed in ‘elephant’ masks.
Since the war began, Ukrainian inmates have given testimony about the return of the horrifying mask – designed to suffocate its victims by restricting oxygen flow – utilised in filtration camps in occupied Kherson.
‘They pulled a gas mask over his head with the valve closed so that air could not enter,’ a captured law enforcer told Ukrainska Pravda, recounting the time he witnessed the method used on his cellmate.
The same fate befell Danylo, the cellmate of Viktor Biletskyi, a soldier from the 406th Separate Artillery Brigade.
‘They put a gas mask on Danylo and electrocuted him to make him suffocate faster, but as soon as he started to lose consciousness, they took off the gas mask. They did not let him die: they wanted him to suffer,’ Biletskyi said.
Plastic ties, which were allegedly used during torture, are seen lying on a broken chair in the basement of an office building in Kherson
A makeshift detention building in Kherson is marked with a Z pro-Putin symbol and ‘Russia’ spelt out in Cyrillic script
A view of Pre-Trial Detention Facility Number Two in the southern Russian city of Taganrog
Ukraine says some 15,000 civilians have been detained by Russia since 2022, of whom at least 1,800 remain in detention facilities, where the UN has evidence of ‘widespread and systematic torture’.
In SIZO-2, the infamous facility in Taganrog, Ukrainian inmates are often forced into a dedicated torture room, where they are handcuffed upside down in a foetal position, their knees strapped to a bar, and for 10-15 minutes are severely beaten.
Others are subjected to shocks administered using a Soviet-era battery-powered field phone called a TA-57. The technique, dubbed ‘Putin’s phone’ by prisoners, involves attaching wires to earlobes, the nose or genitals.
Oleksandr Maksymchuk, a prisoner of war who spent 21 months in the facility across two separate stints, wrote in testimony about suffocation, incessant beatings, electric shocks, and a method where officers encased inmates from head to toe in sticky tape and then sat on them ‘as human furniture’.
Yelyzaveta Shylyk, a former soldier who was a civilian at the time of her capture, was hit with batons all over her body, subjected to electric shocks, threatened with rape and attacked with dogs.
Talking to the Guardian, she recalled a room containing an electric chair: ‘I was put in the electric chair twice … with a device that attached clamps between my toes. Then they turned on the current.’
She described overhearing officers complaining about having to keep the electrocution time to under two hours to prevent them from killing prisoners, as deaths meant more paperwork.
The chief medic of a Ukrainian marine brigade, Volodymyr Labuzov, was transferred to Taganrog in April 2022.
He recalled how he was once forced into the boiler room and pushed waist-deep into a stove used to heat water, then shoved on the meat-cutting table in the kitchen, where he was threatened with a knife.
Others described psychological torture that included forced indoctrination, forced reciting of nationalistic Russian poems, and incessant threats of sexual violence.
A former police building in Kherson lies in ruin during Moscow’s occupation of the city
The UN has evidence of ‘widespread and systematic torture’ in detention facilities in Russian- occupied Ukraine
A door to a basement hole is seen at a restaurant local residents say was used as a torture site by Russian forces during their occupation of the town on November 23, 2022 in Snihurivka
View of torture chambers in police stations in Kherson used by Russian during occupation to intimidate prisoners
The majority of prisoners of war that have been returned to Ukraine after enduring months or in some cases years of captivity in Russia all have one thing in common.
Upon their arrival back in their homeland, Ukrainian PoWs are almost invariably emaciated, their cheekbones protruding out under paper-thin skin and their eyes bulging out of sunken sockets.
Disturbing images released by Ukrainian organisation ‘I Want To Live’ unveiled perhaps one of the most egregious cases of starvation of a Ukrainian prisoner at the hands of Russian guards.
Roman Vasiliovich Gorilyk, one of 74 prisoners exchanged in a prisoner swap on May 31, 2024, was taken hostage in March 2022 and spent more than two years in a Russian cell.
On release, the senior controller at Chernobyl power plant looked like an entirely different person to the man who was captured: every sinew, tendon and bone could be seen creaking beneath mottled skin, which in places was seemingly covered with burns and torture wounds.
Each one of his vertebrae could be counted at a glance, and his head appeared almost too large for his tiny, shrivelled torso.
According to investigators from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), more than 80 per cent of returning Ukrainian prisoners complained about the quantity of food, and claimed the meals they were given were often rotten or contained sand and small rocks.
Others described being given just 250g canned food a day for up to three months, while some said that food was used as a weapon of torture, describing how they were force fed burning hot meals which scorched their mouths, tongues and throats.
Volodymyr Tsema-Bursov, from the southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol, was captured by Putin’s forces a few months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Before the war, he used to play the tuba in a Ukrainian military band in Mariupol, but in February 2022 he became a soldier in the 56th brigade, exchanging his tuba for a rifle.
His time on the battlefield was short-lived, however, when he and his fellow soldiers were apprehended by Russian troops and transferred to Olenivka, near Donetsk, to a makeshift prison.
‘The conditions were terrible. There were no beds,’ he said. ‘Everything was covered in trash and broken glass. It was cold. We didn’t even get drinking water.’
He recalled how they were severely beaten on arrival and their valuables were confiscated, adding: ‘There was a box on the table, and these objects just piled up.’
He was soon taken to a different detention centre in Russia’s Smolensk region, 140 miles west of Moscow, where inmates were practically starved and he lost 36 kilograms.
He recalled how the Russian guards beat him and the other prisoners and forbade them from sitting down, forcing inmates to stand in their cells for eight hours straight instead.
‘I think they did this to break our will,’ Tsema Bursov said. ‘To scare us, to kill our spirit, and to degrade us. They wanted to turn us into these kind of nameless beings.’
As time went on, there were moments when dark thoughts took over his mind, and he became concerned that he would never be freed.
‘We talked about anything, about cars, chocolate candies, anything, just not about prisoner exchanges,’ Tsema-Bursov said. ‘We got used to the thought that it will happen – but when? Who knows? Only God knows.’
But the day of freedom did arrive when they were woken up to the sound of prison guards shouting and swearing, telling them to gather their valuables quickly.
‘I heard this magical sound. You know, the sound that a truck makes when it backs up,’ Tsema-Bursov said. ‘I saw the gate open, and the car pulled in. It was a prisoner transport vehicle. The hazard lights were on. And then, we all got into the truck.’
After a few delays, he was delivered back to Ukraine following 20 months of torment.
Roman Vasiliovich Gorilyk, one of 74 prisoners returned to Ukraine in May 2024
Every sinew, tendon and bone could be seen creaking beneath Roman Gorilyk’s mottled skin
The OCHCR has documented harrowing conditions of maltreatment and abuse in captivity
Photo shows Volodymyr Tsema-Bursov, kept in Russian captivity for 20 months
When Yulian Pylepei, a naval infantryman, was captured by Russian forces in April 2022, he had no idea he would spend the next three years passing through six detention centres, each notorious for torture.
When he was finally released in summer 2025, ‘it took me a month and a half to realise I was really free,’ he told Le Monde, but no time at all to realise he would ‘never be the same again’.
His body still bears the scars of his captivity. ‘A dog bite, in Kursk prison,’ explained the 30-year-old. ‘The broken nose, the fractured leg, that happened there too.’ The white, crisscross lines stamped on his forearm remind him to this day of electric shocks.
In Olenivka, security forces snatched his wedding ring. ‘I tried to stop them by saying: “That’s sacred!” The answer: “Give it to us or we’ll cut your finger off.”’
When Pylepei was first captured, near Mariupol with his seven-man unit, he was held for a few days in the small town of Sartana, then in Donetsk, a major city in the Donbas region.
He was trapped in the basement of a ‘kommandantur’ – the term Ukrainians have used since the outbreak of war for administrative buildings that have been repurposed as the headquarters of Russian occupation authorities.
‘Right under the prosecutor’s office. Everyone slept on the floor. No toilets, dirty water to drink,’ Pylepei recalled.
He was then transferred to Olenivka prison, where ‘we were beaten in groups of four with electric batons. Dogs bit us. Guys were screaming in the corridor’, he said, but that experience paled in comparison to SIZO-2 in Taganrog.
‘The worst of the worst I experienced. Just during the “welcome,” as they call it, two people out of the 100 arrivals were killed.’ Within the prison, ‘everything was forbidden’, even looking out the window for a moment of peace amid the nightmare.
He was then transferred to Novozybkov, in the Bryansk region, and subsequently to Mordovia, southeast of Moscow around the city of Saransk, where he languished in solitary confinement for five months.
When Pylepei was finally freed, he weighed 65 kilograms – 29 kilograms less than two and a half years earlier – and he was disabled, struggling with a limp.
‘For a long time, I kept repeating: “A marine never cries.” But when, on the day of my release, they handed me a phone and I heard my wife’s voice, I cried like a child,’ the former prisoner said.
Now, he makes sure he personally welcomes fellow Ukrainians back when they finally return home from Russia after months – or years – of captivity, to ensure they feel less alone.
‘We talk together about the prisons they passed through, the inmates they met and many other things. I understand them better than anyone, and vice versa.’
Russian soldiers film themselves beating and torturing blindfolded Ukrainian prisoners of war, with one of them firing an AK-74M rifle inches from the downed Ukrainian man’s head
It’s not just Ukrainian prisoners whom Russia subjects to its most lethal methods of torture.
In fact, ever since war broke out, appalling footage of death and violence have become commonplace throughout the country.
While the extreme treatment of criminals by the state is nothing new, the flagrant way in which officials are broadcasting and boasting about their violence is.
A watershed moment illustrating authorities’ blatant promotion of their own barbarity was the punishment of the four men who carried out the terrorist attack on Moscow’s Crocus City Hall in March 2024.
ISIS quickly claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed 150 and injured over 600.
A video released online at the time showed Saidakrami Murodali Rajabalizoda, one of the alleged Islamic State gunmen, held down by a security team who sliced off his ear and shoved it in his mouth, forcing him to eat it.
‘Chew, b****rd! I will cut you open and shove it into your mouth,’ one man is heard yelling in the shocking footage. Moments later, the suspect was seen with blood streaming down the side of his head as a chunk of skin tumbled out of his mouth.
Another suspect, Shamsiddin Fariduni, was seen lying on the floor foaming at the mouth with his trousers forced down around his knees.
That is because the group who arrested him had connected a military radio to his genitals via a piece of wire to administer electric shocks – a popular torture method deployed by Russia’s armed forces.
All four suspected gunmen later appeared in a Moscow court, their faces battered and bruised following what is certain to have been an unflinching beating by the arresting forces.
Muhammadsobir Fayzov was brought into the courtroom in a wheelchair and seemed to lose consciousness during the hearing, while photographs spread online appearing to show that one of his eyes was missing.
Dalerdzhon Barotovich Mirzoyev, another suspect, arrived at the court with bruises and a plastic bag wrapped around his neck, which observers concluded might have been used to asphyxiate him.
‘What is different now is the clear demonstrative nature of the torture,’ Tanya Lokshina, the Europe and central Asia associate director at Human Rights Watch, told the Guardian.
‘The footage of the torture seems to be shared not by accident, but in order to warn others who are planning attacks on Russia that they will face the same consequences. The Russian authorities are no longer shy about showing that its security services torture people. There are no window dressing exercises any more.’
Photographs show Shamsuddin Fariddun lying on a gym floor with his trousers pulled down and wires evidently attached to his groin area
Murodali Rachabalizoda sits behind a glass wall of an enclosure for defendants at the Basmanny district court in Moscow, March 2024
Muhammadsobir Fayzov sits in a glass cage in the Basmanny District Court in Moscow
Today, one of several Russian facilities notorious for torture in the form of sexual violence is OTB-1, a prison hospital in the Saratov region, close to the border with Kazakhstan.
Video reviewed by the Daily Mail documents the abuse of at least five inmates who were urinated on, raped by male prisoners, and violated with blunt objects at the jail.
Human rights campaigners say inmates were subjected to the abuse to coerce them into false confessions, then blackmailed with the footage into abusing other prisoners or becoming jailhouse informants.
The disturbing videos were leaked from jailhouse archives by a former inmate, and handed to human rights site Gulagu.net.
Activists writing on the website said officers in Russia’s Federal Prison Service (FSIN) and FSB spy agency oversaw the ‘conveyor belt’ of abuse at OTB-1.
They say gangs of rapists were employed as orderlies and caretakers at the hospital to provide cover for them if their presence was questioned.
But, campaigners claim, their actual job was the routine sexual abuse of inmates as part of a ‘criminal conspiracy’ operating within the jail.
The rapes in 2021 were filmed, with footage sent back to the FSIN and FSB so it could be archived and then used as blackmail.
Inmates are seen stripped and standing against a wall ahead of a torture session
A victim was shown in dark footage being held over a table and beaten with truncheons
Activists say the campaign of abuse was carried out with the knowledge and approval of senior members of Russia’s prison service and FSB spy agency
Campaigners say the operation was carried out with the knowledge of senior members of both agencies and may have gone on for as long as a decade.
Footage showed a man screaming in pain as he is violated with a mop handle, one male prisoner raping another who is tied to a bed, and a group of inmates urinating on a fellow detainee.
Anton Yefarkin, head of the Saratov prison service, subsequently revealed that 18 officials had been fired with 11 facing ‘the strictest’ disciplinary measure, but witness testimony of widespread torture in Russia’s prison complex remains rampant.
Besides the Saratov region, clips of such heinous abuse have been recorded in prisons located in the regions of Vladimir, Irkutsk, Belgorod, Transbaikal and Kamchatka.
In one harrowing clip, an inmate is seen forced onto his knees before having his head plunged into a toilet bowl.
A guard places his boot on the inmate’s back, forcing his head into the toilet and preventing him from pulling back.
The victim is then held in place while an officer flushes the toilet and effectively waterboards the struggling detainee.
Moments later, the spluttering victim is hauled away and whipped, opening gaping wounds on his unprotected back, before being kicked to the floor where prison staff proceeded to urinate on him.
