An investigation has identified military units under Russia’s command that carried out human rights abuses last year during the occupation of the Ukrainian city of Izium.
In April 2022 Russian forces seized Izium, after a month-long battle. Six months later Ukrainian troops liberated the city in the north-east of the country, during a counteroffensive. They discovered a mass grave, containing 447 bodies including the remains of 22 Ukrainian soldiers, as well as several torture chambers.
The report by the Centre for Information Resilience names four militia units that allegedly abused civilians and prisoners of war. All were from the so-called Luhansk and Donetsk people’s republics. The Kremlin established these pro-Moscow puppet administrations in 2014 after its covert military takeover of some of the eastern Donbas region.
Investigators found the units based themselves in schools and kindergartens, a pattern seen in other occupied areas. Between April and July 2022 the Luhansk People’s Republic [LPR] 5th battalion, a part of the 204th infantry regiment, lived in Izium’s school number six.
The LPR soldiers were poorly trained, badly equipped and frequently drunk, local people said. They stole “everything”, forcing homeowners to kneel at gunpoint, and even removing double glazing from windows. Russian forces used the soldiers as auxiliaries. Their tasks included manning checkpoints and guarding Ukrainian captives.
“They drank a lot and swapped humanitarian aid for homemade vodka,” one survivor recounted. Drunken LPR fighters shot dead two children – aged 12 and 13 – as they ran to a basement, just before a 6pm curfew. The Russian-controlled separatists resented Ukraine for eight years of war and saw occupation as a chance to get rich, the report said.
Another survivor – a 48-year-old electrician called Ihor – told Human Rights Watch last October that Russian soldiers arrested him in his flat, put a bag over his head, and beat him as they dragged him to their car. They drove him to school number six and locked him in a storage cupboard, he recalled. He was accused of possessing marijuana.
Half an hour later they took him out, kicked and slapped him, and called him a fascist. A commander asked him to identify members of Ukraine’s territorial defence forces, who had fought against Russia in the Donbas. The next day he was released. Another resident – 19-year-old Zhenia – said he was beaten, and hit on the head.
The investigators geo-located school number six from video taken by Roman Razum, a Luhansk-born propagandist and singer who has been associated with the LPR since 2014. In April 2022 he and his team filmed themselves unloading aid packages from a truck in the courtyard. Soldiers recorded messages for their loved ones and Razum performed, images show.
Russia’s 20th combined army used Izium’s school number two as a military command and detention centre, the report added. One unit stationed there was the LPR’s Russia legion, an outfit associated with the pro-Kremlin nationalist writer Zakhar Prilepin. In May Prilepin was injured and his bodyguard killed when his car was blown up.
The Russia legion posted pictures of Ukrainian soldiers, captured in the fight for Izium. They were photographed against a pink background with distinctive wallpaper, identified as belonging to the school. Survivors said they were routinely beaten. At least two civilians died there. In June 2022 Ukraine hit the building with a Himars missile, killing many inside.
The investigation located a third torture site, run by soldiers from the Donetsk People’s Republic [DPR]. A DPR unit – Oplot ZP, from the 60th brigade – operated from a compound next to Izium’s municipal boiler plant. A second unit – known as “veterans”, and from the same brigade – stayed in a nearby building. Survivors reported being imprisoned and tortured inside the twin bases, including with electric shocks.
Maksym Marchenko, 25, a local businessman and son of Izium’s mayor, Valerii Marchenko, said it appeared the DPR and LPR had exacted revenge on the people of the town.
“They were the worst among them,” he told the Guardian. “According to the people who lived here during the occupation, the DPR and LPR were the worst and most cruel and the most sadistic … more than the Chechens and more than the Russians themselves.”
Marchenko said the groups were the first to enter Izium and had a very special hatred of Ukraine. This was a time for revenge, he suggested. Marchenko said he had not heard of acts of torture at school number six, but had heard local people talking about what had happened at school number two.
On a visit to that site, which was used as a field hospital by Russian and LPR or DPR forces, the Guardian was shown a ground floor room with a caged inner door where some of the abuse was said to have taken place. Before the conflict, it had been used as a storeroom.
The school is now a derelict shell, looted of anything valuable, but with some telltale signs of the occupation: a Russian uniform left on the floor next to a row of hooks where children would have left their coats; mess tins abandoned in the same room. Pinned to the wall are letters sent by Russian schoolchildren. One sent by a third-grade pupil from the city of Syktyvkar, in the Komi region, begins: “Greetings, soldier!”
Marchenko said a police officer who had stayed throughout the occupation had spoken of men being tied up to the bars found in school gyms and having electric wires attached to their scrotums. The Guardian could not verify these accounts.
The Centre for Information Resilience report says: “Whilst it is Russia that remains ultimately responsible for the tragedies and potential war crimes committed against Ukrainians in Izium, it is also important to acknowledge and scrutinise the role of Ukrainian fighters from Russian-controlled ‘LDPR’.”
It adds: “Many of the victims and survivors of human right abuses perpetrated during the Russian occupation do not know exactly which units were responsible for the abuses committed against them. Victims were often kept blindfolded, held captive in cellars or similar places, or simply never heard their captors identify themselves by name, rank or unit.”
