Ukraine War Day #835: STRANA Exposes Torture in Ukrainian Prisons – Part I

Dear Readers:

Today I have this piece from the Ukrainian newspaper STRANA. The very unpleasant topic is torture in Ukrainian prisons. We are not necessarily talking about political prisoners, just prisoners in general. Well-known and even celebrity prisoners have been tortured cruelly. Completely unknown prisoners have been tortured cruelly. As we shall see below, there is a whole scheme behind this system of organized cruelty: the purpose is to extract money from the many, in order to benefit a handful of monsters.

Scenes of torture in a Ukrainian prison colony.

STRANA investigative reporters have exposed abuses on a very large scale. The scandals continue to resonate within Ukrainian society. As often happens, a lot of this torture is videotaped and becomes available to the public, for reasons we shall see later. In some cases, torture has led to the death of the victim. STRANA raised this issue back in October, after the death under detention of a well-known businessman, Igor Mizrakh, the owner of the Media Holding Group MKhP.

This past week the Ukrainian State Bureau of Investigation (Державне бюро розслідувань, or DBR, roughly the equivalent of the American FBI) announced that it had uncovered a system of torture in a series of penal colonies throughout Ukrainian regions. What they discovered was not isolated instances of abuse, but an entire systematic use of torture against prisoners. For example, four officers of Colony #16 in Poltava Oblast, were running a torture ring. They would severely beat almost every single prisoner who lived there.

Wealthy businessman Igor Mizrak was beaten to death in a prison colony.

According to the DBR, any new arrival to the colony would be beaten mercilessly until his will was broken and he would readily obey any command. The beatings are usually videotaped. They are difficult to watch. For example, in one clip a hulkingly strong man (a guard) wields his truncheon to beat a prisoner’s feet. And continues beating even after the other man loses consciousness. Eventually the other guards drag the unconscious man to an icy pond and toss him in.

DBR are also investigating the acquisition by colony guards of lucrative economic assets well beyond their pay grades. Which means, the guards are not just sadists, but also greedy crooks.

How And Why It Happens

STRANA investigators found sources among prisoners who were willing to tell them what was going on: In which colonies torture is most prevalent, who is doing the torturing, and the reason why they record their crimes on video.

There is a custom of the “Greeting”, in other words, initiating new arrivals into prison life by beating the living sh*t out of them, the moment they emerge from the initial quarantine. This is to let them know, right up front, who is the boss. This custom is applied most often in the so-called “Red Zones”, those colonies which are run fully by the administration. Colony #16 in Poltava is one of these. The newly-arrived zek is taught that he must obey every command or rule issued by either the administration, or a member of the “aktiv” which is the word for zek trustees who collaborate with the administration.

Almost every zek in a Red Zone is forced to “contribute” half his prison salary for the “needs” of the colony. By “needs of the colony” it is understood, the pockets of the Commandant and his Number #2. This “tithe” is for ordinary working zeks, but things get really interesting when the colony manages to reel in a “whale”, for example a former businessman or official, especially those who have wealthy relatives!

[to be continued]