“We were kept in a pit near a petrol station”: a teenager from Kherson region told how he was taken to a torture chamber

A teenager from Kyselivka in the Kherson region was thrown into a pit of pig guts by Russians during the occupation of the village and then sent to a torture chamber.

Vitalii told about it in an interview with Suspilne.

Illustration by Inga Levi / Суспільне

The village was occupied at the beginning of the full-scale invasion. In total, Vitalii, along with his parents and two younger brothers, spent eight months under occupation: On November 10, 2022, the Ukrainian military liberated the village.

Not long before, in September, he spent ten days in captivity. On September 10, 2022, he went for a walk with his uncle. Behind the village was burnt military equipment. The man stopped to text or call someone. At that time, a car with the occupiers drove past them.

They stopped, and four people in military uniforms got out of the car. They started checking their phones, asking who the boy and his uncle wanted to film the military equipment for, and to whom they planned to send their positions. After that, they took them to the “pit”.

“It was a real pit, near a petrol station. There were some guts in it, I think they were pigs. They kept us there for two hours. They said they would shoot us or throw a grenade into the pit. It was scary. Then they tied our hands with plastic straps, blindfolded us, put sacks over our heads and took us to a cell in a basement. We stayed there for an hour, and then we were separated”, Vitalii said.

The guy was taken to a cell where about 15 people were already there. It looked like some kind of shower room: everything was tiled and there was a drain in the corner. Vitalii was the youngest there. 

He says that he was not beaten, but summoned for interrogation. Adults were beaten. For the first four days, he was not fed, other prisoners gave him some food. He was not taken out for walks. After six days, he was transferred to another room, where he was with a man who was taken away because he had a gun at home. Vitalii spent four more days there.

On September 21,  2022, the occupiers came and ordered him to leave. He, his uncle, and the man he was in the cell with were taken away and left near the railway station in Kherson. Vitalii later found out that they were being held in the building of the Kherson Court of Appeal.

“My uncle was beaten, but he did not tell me what happened to him there. I came back to the village and did not go for a walk or even to the shop. I started going out only when our people liberated the village. Now it is calm here, there is no shelling. What do I dream about? I don’t dream about anything. I don’t make any special plans. As God will give”, Vitalii says.

It is worth reminding that in one of the Russian torture chambers found in the de-occupied Kherson region, law enforcement officers found a separate cell for teenagers. According to eyewitnesses, some of the children held there looked to be around 14 years old. 

Earlier, ZMINA reported that the 17-year-old left the occupied Donetsk to study at a Ukrainian university.