31 May 2023
Articles
A witness account of abduction and torture in Hornostaivka village, Kherson region
Serhii, a resident of the Kherson region, was kidnapped from his home on August 3, 2022. At that time, the Southern part of Ukraine, located on both banks of the Dnipro River, had been under the control of the Russian occupying forces for almost five months. At first, the man was kept at the commandant’s office of Nova Kakhovka, a small city on the left bank of the Dnipro River, for some time. Then, Sergii was transferred approximately 50 km East to the former police station of the village of Hornostaivka. While in detention, the Russian occupying forces tried to persuade Serhii to collaborate and point to weapons caches. He refused. On December 22 of last year, Serhii was finally released with a few other civilians.
Torture as a policy of suppressing Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian invasion – Report
ZMINA Human Rights Center collected evidence of how Ukrainians were kidnapped, interrogated, and tortured en masse by Russian occupying forces during the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. According to human rights defenders, the Russian military treats the entire population of the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine as a threat. Torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of civilians is a part of the comprehensive policy of suppressing any resistance to the Russian invasion.
News
Occupation authorities in Ukrainian Crimea accused of using administrative resources to justify Russia’s war
The occupying authorities regularly receive plans to collect "voluntary" aid for the Russian military, which are often funded by Crimean entrepreneurs. Representatives of businesses fear to disapprove of the imposed support for the Russian army due to potential repercussions from occupying bodies
European human rights court will review a complaint on the illegal detention of a Crimean journalist Iryna Danylovych
The European Court of Human Rights took into consideration a complaint submitted by lawyers this January from a Ukrainian human rights group Crimea SOS about the illegal detention and persecution by Russian occupying authorities of a civic journalist Iryna Danylovych from Feodosiya in the Eastern part of the Crimean peninsula.
Human rights crisis in occupied Crimea: wave of persecution targeted voices against Russia and its war in 2022
Crimean human rights defenders characterized the crackdown on dissent in the occupied Crimean Peninsula as part of a broader campaign by the Russian authorities to silence all opposition to their policies in the region
Volunteer Yaroslav Zhuk stated that he was tortured in the Rostov pre-trial detention center
Yaroslav Zhuk made a statement about torture with a shocker and brutal beating by officials of the Rostov-on-Don pre-trial detention center as soon as the court hearing in his case based on trumped-up charges began in early June of this year. Zhuk is a car mechanic and a resident of Melitopol, a city in the Zaporizhzhia region occupied by Russian forces since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Russian occupying forces detained at least 18 Crimeans to check their involvement in subversive actions during the last months
Human rights defenders in Crimea suspect that the number of enforced kidnappings and detentions among Crimean Tatars, in fact, is much higher. People may conceal these incidents, fearing further repressions
