Oleg Davygora21:53, 03/02/23

In prisons, first of all, people were related to Ukrainian state bodies or civil society – activists, journalists, civil servants and teachers.

The detention center in Kherson was part of a network of at least 20 institutions that Ukrainian and international lawyers say were part of a deliberate Russian strategy to destroy Ukrainian identity .

“These detention centers are interconnected, they behave in a very similar, if not identical way,” Wayne Jordash, head of the Mobile Justice Team, a team of international investigators supporting Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office, told CNN .

The investigation revealed that Russian troops followed a very specific plan in several occupied areas, with clear patterns pointing to a comprehensive plan for Moscow’s occupation of Ukraine.

“The first stage, in fact, is to detain and, in many cases, kill a category of people called “leaders”, that is, those who could physically resist the occupation, but also those who could resist it culturally,” said Jordash .

In prisons, first of all, people were related to Ukrainian state bodies or civil society – activists, journalists, civil servants and teachers.

“The second stage is a kind of filtering process, in which the population remaining outside the detention centers is subjected to constant monitoring and filtering, so that anyone who is suspected of having links with the “leaders” or was involved in organizing any kind of resistance, also then they were identified and either deported to Russia or kept in isolation and tortured,” he said.

Dzhordash said that these methods were used not only in Kherson, but also in other areas occupied by Russian troops, such as the Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Borodyanka. However, he added, the long occupation of Kherson allowed the Russian troops to go even further.

Ukrainian and international investigators also said they found financial links to these detention centers with the Russian state.

“These detention centers have financial ties to the Russian state. These financial documents show that the civil administration is funded from Russia, and the civil administration finances the detention centers, so you have very clear patterns and very clear connections,” said Jordash , referring to documents discovered by investigators.

Torture RF in the occupied territories

On March 2 , the bodies of three more people who died during the Russian occupation were exhumed in the Buchansky district of the Kiev region . Andrey Nebytov, the head of the Kyiv region police, noted that this burial was made by a local resident during the occupation around March 8, 2022. According to preliminary information, one of the dead is a 50-year-old local resident who was shot in a car, the other two are unrecognizable.

In the Kherson region, law enforcement officers found  seven places of torture and eight places of detention . More than 300 cases of torture were confirmed in the temporary detention center alone.

The head of the Lugansk OVA Serhiy Gaidai said that the Russian invaders are intimidating the inhabitants of the Lugansk region and creating new torture facilities.

The Russian invaders want to create 24 penal colonies in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. This is stated in the order of the Russian government.

(C)UNIAN 2023