Ukrainian playwright recalls his torture by pro-Russian separatists
The two friends were taken to Slovyansk’s secret police building – a former KGB site – that was in control of pro-Russian separatists.
“It looks like the place where you can torture people,” Yurov said. “It was awful.”
Guards broke Yurov’s nose, but that was just the start. When the separatists found pictures and videos on his friend’s iPad from the Maidan, Kyiv’s central square and the heart of the political protests earlier this year, they really got mad.
“They were hitting us. They [were] like, ‘Did you scream ‘Glory to Ukraine’?’ And we’re like, ‘No,’ and they hit us again,” Yurov said.
But the separatists didn’t stop. At one point, Yurov said one guard put his knife to his ear, another poured gasoline on his head and a third pointed a gun at him.
“I was thinking, ‘You’re going to burn me? You’re going to cut my ear and you’re going to shoot me at the same time?’” he said. “I mean, it was scary, of course, but at the same time, it was like a situation [from] a bad movie.”
During the two weeks Yurov was kept in that basement cell, he was forced into stress positions, repeatedly beaten and given little to eat.
In April, pro-Russian separatists proclaimed areas around Donetsk and Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine as independent “People’s Republics,” and the ensuing conflict has left more than 3,000 dead, reports the U.N. – not including the victims of downed Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. Hundreds of thousands fled; an estimated 30 percent of Slovyansk emptied out when the fighting began. And while the conflict has quieted under a fragile truce, human rights workers are still accounting for the up to a thousand civilians who they say have been held or are still held by separatists.
“They used Stalin-era law like the death penalty, imitating Stalin’s 1941 martial law declaration,” said Evhenya Zakreskaya, a Kyiv human rights attorney who now represents Yurov and a dozen other former prisoners. “They used torture.”