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Russia’s Civic Chamber unveils report on torture in south-eastern Ukraine

“The large-scale and systematic character of tortures allows us to say it has been sanctioned by the leadership of Ukraine,” one of the report’s authors Maxim Grigoryev said

MOSCOW, November 24. /TASS/. Russia’s Civic Chamber presented a report on Monday revealing the truth about crimes committed by the Ukrainian troops during the armed conflict in south-eastern Ukraine.

“The data that we have received allows us to say that Ukraine’s Armed Forces, the National Guard, other formations of the Interior Ministry and Ukraine’s Security Service have been systematically and on purpose violating international conventions, using torture,” one of the report’s authors Maxim Grigoryev said.

The experts of the Civic Chamber, a governmental civil society oversight body created by the president in the early 2000s, questioned over 100 people in Donetsk who were handed over to self-defense militias during prisoner exchanges.

“The large-scale and systematic character of tortures allows us to say that their usage is an intended policy of structures and has been sanctioned by the leadership (of Ukraine),” Grigoryev said.

Grigoryev said people “had been thrown into holes with corpses, crushed with excavator bucket, burnt by burner device, hung on their hands and had had their toes hit with a sledge hammer,” while the use of electric current is a standard method of tortures.

He stressed that most victims had no link to militias in eastern Ukraine and had never held weapons and had been seized upon accusations which are “completely absurd."