Russia rejected the allegations made at an informal UN Security Council meeting, with its Deputy UN Representative Maria Zabolotskaya calling it "a disinformation campaign" and alleging that Russian prisoners in Ukraine were subjected to "torture and degradation and moral and physical abuse."
Khuan Alberto Levya Garsiya, still an active member of the Ukrainian military, said his Russian captors subjected him to every imaginable form of torture during 1183 days in captivity.
"Yes ... I was tortured," he told reporters after the UN meeting.
"Anything you can think of that can be done hurtful, humiliating to a man, unwillingly. Anything that comes to your mind, not only verbal, physical abuse, daily beatings, electrocution, excessive, excessive exercises in freezing cold when it's minus degrees ... sexual abuse. Everything that can be applied to a person into making a person break mentally. It was all applied to me and most of my comrades."
Garsiya said he was lucky to survive but two of his friends were beaten to death in detention centres in the Donetsk region.
Prisoners were held in "overcrowded barracks without adequate conditions," where "almost all POWs were ill with dysentery" and many were starving, he told the UN meeting.
A Ukrainian with a Cuban father, he said guards targeted him particularly because of his Latino name, accusing him of being "a mercenary and an American spy."
Crimean Tatar activist Leniie Umerova, released in a prisoner exchange in 2024, said she was detained while trying to visit her seriously ill father in Crimea.
She described being moved through "seven detention facilities" in what she called "a carousel of repression" and accused Russia of using torture against Ukrainians in captivity.
Oleg Gushin of the Ukrainian government's Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War said Ukrainian prisoners were "killed and tortured" in detention.
He said Kyiv had identified "more than 300 places of detention" in Russia and occupied Ukrainian territory and while more than 9000 Ukrainians had been returned through exchanges, "thousands" remained in Russian captivity.
Ukraine's Chargé d'Affaires Volodymyr Pavlichenko called for greater international pressure and accountability for Russia's treatment of prisoners.
UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Claudia Fuentes Julio said UN monitoring showed "widespread and systematic torture and ill-treatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilian detainees by the Russian Federation authorities continues," including sexual violence.
Since February 2022, the UN Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights had documented the execution of 129 Ukrainian prisoners of war at the beginning of their captivity and the deaths of 48 in custody, resulting from torture, denial of medical care, or other inhumane conditions of detention, she said.
She said more than 95 per cent of Ukrainian prisoners of war interviewed reported experiencing torture or ill-treatment.
Fuentes Julio said the OHCHR had also documented torture and ill-treatment of Russian and third-country national prisoners of war held by Ukraine, but "on a fundamentally different scale."
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