Freed Ukrainian prisoner describes torture in Russia
Mykola Karpyuk, a Ukrainian citizen who was held as a political prisoner in Russia until recently, described on Ukrainian TV how he was tortured in the Russian prison in Vladikavkaz.
“As soon as it got dark, they took me to the corridor, handcuffed, hands behind my back, put a cellophane bag over my head, wrapped around duct tape, cotton wool, so that I could see nothing from below, and then took me out. We traveled for 10-15 minutes, they took me to some kind of facility, took me up to the fourth floor, a clamp on my right toe, a clamp on my right finger or other parts of my body, and a current started to pass through my body. At different intervals, in bursts, over a period of time. A nasty feeling. And that’s what they did to me. Then they took me there, to the prison, a room for interrogation – a metal cage, meter by meter, and there was a chair. And at night, for hours, they didn’t let me sleep. You’re just starting to close your eyes, every two hours they would change these cops, and immediately ‘Don’t sleep! Don’t sleep!’ – they wouldn’t let me sleep,” Karpyuk explained.
He said that after four nights of torture, he simply lost consciousness.
“Four nights there was torture, on the fifth night there was no longer torture, but on that night, because I had not slept, because they had not let me sleep, I just lost consciousness there and went into a delirium… And then I woke up in my cell, I was transferred to my cell on the sixth day,” Karpyuk recounted.
He also said that Stanislav Klykh was tortured in the prison.
“And I was even lucky, they treated me a bit differently. What happened to Stanislav Klykh... they brought him and put him in a cell, cuffed his hands behind his back to the bed, made him kneel, and the entire night they didn’t let him sleep, screaming ‘On your knees!, ‘Don’t sleep!’, ‘Don’t move!’” Karpyuk recalled.
Many other political prisoners have reported being tortured in Russia and in occupied Crimea, including Oleksandr Steshenko, Yevhen Panov and Andriy Zakhtei.