Messages
2 months ago
<< Thread Modifed February 8 at 1:56PM >>
The Ukraine War
<< Thread Modifed February 8 at 1:56PM >>
I'm starting this thread regarding a neglected topic: the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is about to turn three years old.
It seems Putin is not negotiating, so it's the US's play. And we may have some news on that within the next week. Bargaining chips could include the following:
-turning Russia's $300B in confiscated assets until Ukrainian weapons
-insisting Europe cough up more money to fund Ukraine defense and rebuilding
-Ukraine gives the US access to mineral resources. Good, everyone is finally coming around to what this war is really about: the economic national interest of the US vs Russia.
Wars begin with all sorts of rationalizations, best intentions, propaganda, and fanfare. They end with guarantees on trade security and division of resources.
2 months ago
RE: The Ukraine War
Sharing this recent article (after painstakingly editing it to comply with Fanstory's rigid formatting requirements) which hopefully Trump and any pro-Russia acolytes will read before giving Putin what he wants. Much as some of us would like for Moscow to be razed, it seems unlikely that is going to happen, but some measure of justice is possible for these abused POWs.
By Thomas Grove, WSJ, Feb 10, 2025
In the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the head of St. Petersburg's prisons delivered a direct message to an elite unit of guards tasked with overseeing the influx of prisoners from the war: "Be cruel, don't pity them."
Maj. Gen. Igor Potapenko had gathered his service's special forces at the regional headquarters to tell them about a new system that had been designed for captured Ukrainians.
Normal rules wouldn't apply, he told them. There would be no restrictions against violence. The body cameras that were mandatory elsewhere in Russia's prison system would be gone.
The guards would rotate through Russia’s prison system, serving a month at a time in prisons before other teams took their place. Across the country, other units -- from Buryatia, Moscow, Pskov and elsewhere -- received similar instructions.
Those meetings set in motion nearly three years of relentless and brutal torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war. Guards applied electric shocks to prisoners' genitals until batteries ran out. They beat the prisoners to inflict maximum damage, experimenting to see what type of material would be most painful. They withheld medical treatment to allow gangrene to set in, forcing amputations.
Three former prison officials told The Wall Street Journal how Russia planned and executed what United Nations investigators have described as widespread and systematic torture. Their accounts were supported by official documents, interviews with Ukrainian prisoners and a person who has helped the Russian prison officials defect.
Known Russian prisons where Ukrainian POWs are being held
Note: As of Feb. 3
Sources: Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project (Russian forces); staff reports (prisons) Andrew Barnett/WSJ
The officials -- two from the special forces and one member of a medical team -- have entered a witness-protection program after giving testimony to the International Criminal Court's investigators. The two special-forces officers said they quit the prison service before they were forced to engage in torture but kept in touch with their colleagues who stayed.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russian and Ukrainian ombudsmen overseeing the treatment of prisoners were in contact and that exchanges were continuing. He said broad generalizations about Russian prison conditions are unfounded. "You have to look at individual cases," he said.
Neither the office of Russia's commissioner for human rights nor its presidential human-rights commission responded to requests for comment.
The ICC has accused Russia of attacking civilians and unlawfully transporting Ukrainian children to Russia, issuing at least six arrest warrants for Russian officials, including for President Vladimir Putin. Other investigations are continuing, the ICC said, but it declined to comment further.
Russia has a long history of cruelty in its prison system, reaching back to the earliest decades of the Soviet Union, when Joseph Stalin created labor camps for those deemed dangerous to Soviet rule. In recent decades, Russia has taken some steps to improve conditions, such as separating first-time offenders from the rest of the prison population, and some regions have introduced body cameras for guards after years of campaigning by human-rights groups.
A satellite image of a pretrial detention center in Tver, Russia. PHOTO: MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES
But Russia's prison system remains a separate world inside the country, with its own rules, slang and even tattoos meant to denote authority within prison walls. Many prisons are in remote locations where the guards act with impunity, said the prisoners and rights advocates.
The special forces in the Russian prison services aren't regular guards who are based in individual prisons full time. Instead, they act as a praetorian guard that is called in to deal with particularly dangerous situations, such as conducting searches or controlling uprisings.
While dealing with Ukrainian prisoners of war, they were tasked with working with local prison guards to direct the POWs' activities. They interpreted Potapenko’s instructions at that March 2022 meeting as a carte blanche for violence, said the two former guards. They pushed their mistreatment of Ukrainians to a new level with the belief that they had the permission of their leadership, said one of the former guards.
While on duty, the guards wore balaclavas at all times. Prisoners were beaten if they looked a guard in the eye. Those measures, along with the monthlong rotations, were taken to make sure individual guards and their superiors couldn’t be recognized later, said one of the former officers.
In March 2022 -- the same month that Potapenko held the meeting with guards in St. Petersburg -- Russia began preparing its penitentiary system for the arrival of prisoners from the war. Letters went out to prison authorities across Russia ordering them to clear out floors, wings and even entire prisons, according to documents and one of the former prison officials.
On the battlefield, Russia was encountering fiercer resistance from Ukrainians than Moscow had expected. Prison authorities were similarly unprepared for the number of POWs they would have to hold.
Pavel Afisov, who was taken prisoner in the city of Mariupol in the initial months of the war, was among the first Ukrainian prisoners detained in Russia. For 2.5 years, the 25-year-old was moved from prison to prison in Russia before being released in October of last year.
He said beatings were the worst when he was transferred into new prisons. After arriving at a penitentiary in Russia's Tver region, north of Moscow, he was led by guards into a medical examination room and ordered to strip naked. They shocked him repeatedly with a stun gun while shaving his head and beard.
When it was over, he was told to yell "glory to Russia, glory to the special forces" and then ordered to walk to the front of the room -- still naked -- to sing the Russian and Soviet national anthems. When he said he didn't know the words, the guards beat him again with their fists and batons.
The violence served a purpose for the Russian authorities, according to the former guards and human-rights advocates: making them more malleable for interrogations and breaking their will to fight. Prison interrogations were sometimes aimed at extracting confessions of war crimes or gaining operational intelligence from prisoners who had little will to resist after they suffered extreme brutality.
Andriy Yegorov found out he had five broken vertebrae when he returned home. PHOTO: SERHII KOROVAYNY FOR WSJ
The cruelty made them more willing to submit to Russian interrogators and drained "any will or ability to fight again if they are ever swapped," said Vladimir Osechkin, who heads human-rights organization Gulagu.net and has helped Russian officers from the penitentiary system leave the country and offer testimony to the ICC.
The former guards described a staggering level of violence directed at Ukrainian prisoners. Electric shockers were used so often, especially in showers, that officers complained about them running out of battery life too fast.
One former penitentiary system employee, who worked with a team of medics in Voronezh region in southwestern Russia, said prison guards beat Ukrainians until their police batons broke. He said a boiler room was littered with broken batons and the officers tested other materials, including insulated hot-water pipes, for their ability to cause pain and damage.
The guards, he said, intentionally beat prisoners on the same spot day after day, preventing bruises from healing and causing infection inside the accumulated hematoma. The treatment led to blood poisoning and muscle tissue would rot. At least one person died from sepsis, the officer said.
Many of the guards enjoyed the brutality and often bragged about how much pain they had caused prisoners, he said.
Ukrainian former POW Andriy Yegorov, 25, recalled how guards at a prison in Russia's western Bryansk region would force prisoners to run 100 yards through the hallway, holding mattresses above their heads. The guards stood to the side and beat them in the ribs as they ran by.
When they got to the end of the hall, they would be forced to do sit-ups and push-ups. Each time they came up, the guards would punch them or hit them with a baton.
"They loved it, you could hear them laughing between themselves while we cried out in pain," he said. "There I understood fear exists only for the future, you can be afraid of what happens in 10 or 15 minutes, you can be afraid of what might happen. But when it’s happening, you're no longer afraid."
A pretrial detention center in Bryansk, western Russia. PHOTO: MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES
Two of the longest-held prisoners of war, both Afisov and Yegorov spent around 30 months in the Russian prison system before they were finally released in a swap that brought them home on Oct. 18.
Yegorov found out during his medical checkup following the exchange that he had five broken vertebrae. He is undergoing medical treatment for his injuries and has met with a hospital-appointed psychologist. But he is skeptical that the psychologist can help.
"If you haven't gone through what I've gone through, you can't help me," said Yegorov.
After returning home, Afisov resisted sleep for days, fearing it could turn out to be a dream and he would wake up back in prison. "Then whenever I finally trusted myself enough to fall asleep all I had was nightmares," he said.
The former prison officials were preparing to start new lives when they spoke with the Journal. They are now living in undisclosed locations and have had to cut off contact with people they had known all their lives.
One of them said he had always been a Russian patriot and never wanted to live anywhere else but Russia. But after the war began, he said, he couldn't stay in the country or remain silent. He said giving testimony to the ICC was one way to work toward justice.
-- Daria Matviichuk contributed to this article.
Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com
RE: The Ukraine War
Sharing this recent article (after painstakingly editing it to comply with Fanstory's rigid formatting requirements) which hopefully Trump and any pro-Russia acolytes will read before giving Putin what he wants. Much as some of us would like for Moscow to be razed, it seems unlikely that is going to happen, but some measure of justice is possible for these abused POWs.
"Be Cruel": inside Russia's torture system of Ukrainian POWs
By Thomas Grove, WSJ, Feb 10, 2025
In the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the head of St. Petersburg's prisons delivered a direct message to an elite unit of guards tasked with overseeing the influx of prisoners from the war: "Be cruel, don't pity them."
Maj. Gen. Igor Potapenko had gathered his service's special forces at the regional headquarters to tell them about a new system that had been designed for captured Ukrainians.
Normal rules wouldn't apply, he told them. There would be no restrictions against violence. The body cameras that were mandatory elsewhere in Russia's prison system would be gone.
The guards would rotate through Russia’s prison system, serving a month at a time in prisons before other teams took their place. Across the country, other units -- from Buryatia, Moscow, Pskov and elsewhere -- received similar instructions.
Those meetings set in motion nearly three years of relentless and brutal torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war. Guards applied electric shocks to prisoners' genitals until batteries ran out. They beat the prisoners to inflict maximum damage, experimenting to see what type of material would be most painful. They withheld medical treatment to allow gangrene to set in, forcing amputations.
Three former prison officials told The Wall Street Journal how Russia planned and executed what United Nations investigators have described as widespread and systematic torture. Their accounts were supported by official documents, interviews with Ukrainian prisoners and a person who has helped the Russian prison officials defect.
Known Russian prisons where Ukrainian POWs are being held
Note: As of Feb. 3
Sources: Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project (Russian forces); staff reports (prisons) Andrew Barnett/WSJ
The officials -- two from the special forces and one member of a medical team -- have entered a witness-protection program after giving testimony to the International Criminal Court's investigators. The two special-forces officers said they quit the prison service before they were forced to engage in torture but kept in touch with their colleagues who stayed.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russian and Ukrainian ombudsmen overseeing the treatment of prisoners were in contact and that exchanges were continuing. He said broad generalizations about Russian prison conditions are unfounded. "You have to look at individual cases," he said.
Neither the office of Russia's commissioner for human rights nor its presidential human-rights commission responded to requests for comment.
The ICC has accused Russia of attacking civilians and unlawfully transporting Ukrainian children to Russia, issuing at least six arrest warrants for Russian officials, including for President Vladimir Putin. Other investigations are continuing, the ICC said, but it declined to comment further.
Russia has a long history of cruelty in its prison system, reaching back to the earliest decades of the Soviet Union, when Joseph Stalin created labor camps for those deemed dangerous to Soviet rule. In recent decades, Russia has taken some steps to improve conditions, such as separating first-time offenders from the rest of the prison population, and some regions have introduced body cameras for guards after years of campaigning by human-rights groups.
A satellite image of a pretrial detention center in Tver, Russia. PHOTO: MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES
But Russia's prison system remains a separate world inside the country, with its own rules, slang and even tattoos meant to denote authority within prison walls. Many prisons are in remote locations where the guards act with impunity, said the prisoners and rights advocates.
The special forces in the Russian prison services aren't regular guards who are based in individual prisons full time. Instead, they act as a praetorian guard that is called in to deal with particularly dangerous situations, such as conducting searches or controlling uprisings.
While dealing with Ukrainian prisoners of war, they were tasked with working with local prison guards to direct the POWs' activities. They interpreted Potapenko’s instructions at that March 2022 meeting as a carte blanche for violence, said the two former guards. They pushed their mistreatment of Ukrainians to a new level with the belief that they had the permission of their leadership, said one of the former guards.
While on duty, the guards wore balaclavas at all times. Prisoners were beaten if they looked a guard in the eye. Those measures, along with the monthlong rotations, were taken to make sure individual guards and their superiors couldn’t be recognized later, said one of the former officers.
In March 2022 -- the same month that Potapenko held the meeting with guards in St. Petersburg -- Russia began preparing its penitentiary system for the arrival of prisoners from the war. Letters went out to prison authorities across Russia ordering them to clear out floors, wings and even entire prisons, according to documents and one of the former prison officials.
On the battlefield, Russia was encountering fiercer resistance from Ukrainians than Moscow had expected. Prison authorities were similarly unprepared for the number of POWs they would have to hold.
Pavel Afisov, who was taken prisoner in the city of Mariupol in the initial months of the war, was among the first Ukrainian prisoners detained in Russia. For 2.5 years, the 25-year-old was moved from prison to prison in Russia before being released in October of last year.
He said beatings were the worst when he was transferred into new prisons. After arriving at a penitentiary in Russia's Tver region, north of Moscow, he was led by guards into a medical examination room and ordered to strip naked. They shocked him repeatedly with a stun gun while shaving his head and beard.
When it was over, he was told to yell "glory to Russia, glory to the special forces" and then ordered to walk to the front of the room -- still naked -- to sing the Russian and Soviet national anthems. When he said he didn't know the words, the guards beat him again with their fists and batons.
The violence served a purpose for the Russian authorities, according to the former guards and human-rights advocates: making them more malleable for interrogations and breaking their will to fight. Prison interrogations were sometimes aimed at extracting confessions of war crimes or gaining operational intelligence from prisoners who had little will to resist after they suffered extreme brutality.
Andriy Yegorov found out he had five broken vertebrae when he returned home. PHOTO: SERHII KOROVAYNY FOR WSJ
The cruelty made them more willing to submit to Russian interrogators and drained "any will or ability to fight again if they are ever swapped," said Vladimir Osechkin, who heads human-rights organization Gulagu.net and has helped Russian officers from the penitentiary system leave the country and offer testimony to the ICC.
The former guards described a staggering level of violence directed at Ukrainian prisoners. Electric shockers were used so often, especially in showers, that officers complained about them running out of battery life too fast.
One former penitentiary system employee, who worked with a team of medics in Voronezh region in southwestern Russia, said prison guards beat Ukrainians until their police batons broke. He said a boiler room was littered with broken batons and the officers tested other materials, including insulated hot-water pipes, for their ability to cause pain and damage.
The guards, he said, intentionally beat prisoners on the same spot day after day, preventing bruises from healing and causing infection inside the accumulated hematoma. The treatment led to blood poisoning and muscle tissue would rot. At least one person died from sepsis, the officer said.
Many of the guards enjoyed the brutality and often bragged about how much pain they had caused prisoners, he said.
Ukrainian former POW Andriy Yegorov, 25, recalled how guards at a prison in Russia's western Bryansk region would force prisoners to run 100 yards through the hallway, holding mattresses above their heads. The guards stood to the side and beat them in the ribs as they ran by.
When they got to the end of the hall, they would be forced to do sit-ups and push-ups. Each time they came up, the guards would punch them or hit them with a baton.
"They loved it, you could hear them laughing between themselves while we cried out in pain," he said. "There I understood fear exists only for the future, you can be afraid of what happens in 10 or 15 minutes, you can be afraid of what might happen. But when it’s happening, you're no longer afraid."
A pretrial detention center in Bryansk, western Russia. PHOTO: MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES
Two of the longest-held prisoners of war, both Afisov and Yegorov spent around 30 months in the Russian prison system before they were finally released in a swap that brought them home on Oct. 18.
Yegorov found out during his medical checkup following the exchange that he had five broken vertebrae. He is undergoing medical treatment for his injuries and has met with a hospital-appointed psychologist. But he is skeptical that the psychologist can help.
"If you haven't gone through what I've gone through, you can't help me," said Yegorov.
After returning home, Afisov resisted sleep for days, fearing it could turn out to be a dream and he would wake up back in prison. "Then whenever I finally trusted myself enough to fall asleep all I had was nightmares," he said.
The former prison officials were preparing to start new lives when they spoke with the Journal. They are now living in undisclosed locations and have had to cut off contact with people they had known all their lives.
One of them said he had always been a Russian patriot and never wanted to live anywhere else but Russia. But after the war began, he said, he couldn't stay in the country or remain silent. He said giving testimony to the ICC was one way to work toward justice.
-- Daria Matviichuk contributed to this article.
Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com
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