In the Russian Penal Colony, They Called Him ‘Dr. Evil’

Writing and editing by Julia Wallace, Elena Loginova, and Ilya Lozovsky (Lozovsky is a Fletcher alum and writer and senior editor at the Organized Crime and Corruption Project)

Deep in the Russian heartland, hundreds of kilometers from home, Ukrainian prisoners of war were tormented by a sadistic doctor. Reporters set out to unmask him.

When you arrived, it would be like this:

You entered the reception room.

You were stripped to the skin.

You were shaved.

You were beaten with a truncheon.

Then you met Dr. Evil.

“I was put in a bent-over pose and brought to get an X-ray,” Pavlo remembers. “And at the X-ray there was this Dr. Evil, as we call him, shouting and with a stun gun.”

“He started waving the stun gun, hit me a couple of times, began to threaten me, saying, ‘Hurry up, don’t be stupid.’ … He said that we ‘stinking Ukrainians’ didn’t deserve any decent treatment after what we had done.”

What had they done? Pavlo, and dozens of others trucked into this penal colony, had fought for their home country in the war that followed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Many of them had been captured after taking part in the desperate defense of Mariupol, a coastal city that was almost entirely destroyed by Russian bombardment. Its ruin, and the months-long siege of the massive Azovstal steel plant, where its last defenders holed up in increasingly desperate conditions, became a global symbol of the savagery of the war. 

Now they were prisoners, deep within Russia. 

There are an estimated 8,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war in Russia, along with civilian Ukrainian captives; thousands of other POWs have already returned home in organized prisoner swaps. Reports of their torture and abuse have been trickling out since the first group arrived back in Ukraine in 2022, and have kept coming with the release of additional prisoners. 

Returned POWs tended to report that one of the worst places to be held captive was Mordovia, a region in central Russia known for the many prisons and detention centers that dot its forested landscape, a legacy of the Soviet gulag system. Investigative journalists at Radio Free Europe’s Ukrainian service wanted to learn more about what was actually happening in these facilities. 

Although Mordovia has over a dozen prisons, nearly all the Ukrainian POWs sent there were held in a facility called Penal Colony No. 10, a large complex that sits along a road cutting through a forest, more than 500 kilometers from the Ukrainian border. 

Reporters obtained a list of 177 Ukrainians who had been held at Penal Colony No. 10 from sources in Ukrainian law enforcement. Nearly all, according to Ukrainian officials who interviewed them when they returned home, reported having been tortured and subjected to relentless physical and psychological violence. So reporters started reaching out to hear their stories. 

There was Pavlo Afisov, a military school graduate from the north of Ukraine who spent 614 days in Colony No. 10., along with stints in other Russian prisons. Yulian Pylypey, who still has a scar on his forehead after his captors set an attack dog on him and spent 171 days in the colony. Oleksandr Kiriienko, who sports a Viking beard and has served in the Ukrainian army since 2014, was there for 726 days. And Nikita Pikulyk, a young man with a boyish face who was captured after he had slipped out of Mariupol in civilian clothes. He spent 336 days in Mordovia.

Forty-six other POWs also agreed to speak about their experiences. 

Read the full article here.

(This post is republished from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.)