Ukraine

IZIUM, Ukraine (AP) — The first time the Russian soldiers caught him, they tossed him bound and blindfolded into a trench covered with wooden boards for days on end.

Then they beat him, over and over: Legs, arms, a hammer to the knees, all accompanied by furious diatribes against Ukraine. Before they let him go, they took away his passport and Ukrainian military ID — all he had to prove his existence — and made sure he knew exactly how worthless his life was.

“No one needs you,” the commander taunted. “We can shoot you any time, bury you a half-meter underground and that’s it.”

The brutal encounter at the end of March was just the start. Andriy Kotsar would be captured and tortured twice more by Russian forces in Izium, and the pain would be even worse.

Andriy Kotsar, who was tortured by Russian soldiers, sits at a table after a service at Pishchanskyi church. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Russian torture in Izium was arbitrary, widespread and absolutely routine for both civilians and soldiers throughout the city, an Associated Press investigation has found. While torture was also evident in Bucha, that devastated Kyiv suburb was only occupied for a month. Izium served as a hub for Russian soldiers for nearly seven months, during which they established torture sites everywhere.

Based on accounts of survivors and police, AP journalists located 10 torture sites in the town and gained access to five of them. They included a deep sunless pit in a residential compound with dates carved in the brick wall, a clammy underground jail that reeked of urine and rotting food, a medical clinic, a police station and a kindergarten.

The AP spoke to 15 survivors of Russian torture in the Kharkiv region, as well as two families whose loved ones disappeared into Russian hands. Two of the men were taken repeatedly and abused. One battered, unconscious Ukrainian soldier was displayed to his wife to force her to provide information she simply didn't have.

The AP also confirmed eight men were killed under torture in Russian custody, according to survivors and families. All but one were civilians.

At a mass grave site created by the Russians and discovered in the woods of Izium, at least 30 of the 447 bodies recently excavated bore visible marks of torture — bound hands, close gunshot wounds, knife wounds and broken limbs, according to the Kharkiv regional prosecutor’s office. Those injuries corresponded to the descriptions of the pain inflicted upon the survivors.

AP journalists also saw bodies with bound wrists at the mass grave. Amid the trees were hundreds of simple wooden crosses, most marked only with numbers. One said it contained the bodies of 17 Ukrainian soldiers. At least two more mass graves have been found in the town, all heavily mined, authorities said.

Unidentified graves of civilians and Ukrainian soldiers are marked with a cross in a cemetery. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

A physician who treated hundreds of Izium’s injured during the Russian occupation said people regularly arrived at his emergency room with injuries consistent with torture, including gunshots to their hands and feet, broken bones and severe bruising, and burns. None would explain their wounds, he said.

“Even if people came to the hospital, silence was the norm,” chief Dr. Yuriy Kuznetsov said. He added that one soldier came in for treatment for hand injuries, clearly from being cuffed, but the man refused to say what happened.

Men with links to Ukrainian forces were singled out repeatedly for torture, but any adult man risked getting caught up. Matilda Bogner, the head of the U.N. human rights mission in Ukraine, told the AP they had documented “widespread practices of torture or ill-treatment of civilian detainees” by Russian forces and affiliates. Torture of soldiers was also systemic, she said.

Torture in any form during an armed conflict is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, whether of prisoners of war or civilians.

“It serves three purposes,” said Rachel Denber of Human Rights Watch. “Torture came with questions to coerce information, but it is also to punish and to sow fear. It is to send a chilling message to everyone else.”

NO SAFE HAVEN

AP journalists found Kotsar, 26, hiding in a monastery in Izium, his blond hair tied back neatly in the Orthodox fashion and his beard curling beneath his chin. He had no way to safely contact his loved ones, who thought he was dead.

Back in March, after his first round of torture, Kotsar fled to the gold-domed Pishchanskyi church. Russian soldiers were everywhere, and nowhere in Izium was safe.

Hiding amid the icons, Kotsar listened to the rumble of Russian armored vehicles outside and contemplated suicide. He had been a soldier for just under a month and had no idea if anyone in his little unit had survived the Russian onslaught.

When he emerged from the church a few days later, a Russian patrol caught him. They kept him a week. His captors’ idea of a joke was to shave his legs with a knife, and then debate aloud whether to slice off the limb entirely.

“They took, I don’t know what exactly, some iron, maybe glass rods, and burned the skin little by little,” he said.

Andriy Kotsar, right, who was tortured by Russian soldiers, takes part in a procession near Pishchanskyi church. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Andriy Kotsar, who was tortured by Russian soldiers, feeds birds. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Andriy Kotsar, who was tortured by Russian soldiers, kisses a cross during a service at Pishchanskyi church. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Andriy Kotsar, who was tortured by Russian soldiers, carries buckets with water near Pishchanskyi monastery. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

He knew nothing that could help them. So they set him free again, and again he sought refuge with the monks. He had nowhere else to go.

By then, the church and monastery compound had become a shelter for around 100 people, including 40 children. Kotsar took up a version of the monastic life, living with the black-robed brothers, helping them care for the refugees and spending his free hours standing before the gilt icons in contemplation.

In the meantime, Izium was transforming into a Russian logistical hub. The town was swarming with troops, and its electricity, gas, water and phone networks were severed. Izium was effectively cut off from the rest of Ukraine.

A Ukrainian serviceman inspects a kindergarten basement which was used by Russian forces. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

SCREAMS IN THE NIGHT

It was also in the spring that the Russians first sought out Mykola Mosyakyn, driving down the rutted dirt roads until they reached the Ukrainian soldier’s fenced cottage. Mosyakyn, 38, had enlisted after the war began, though not in the same unit as Kotsar.

They tossed him into a pit with standing water, handcuffed him and hung him by the restraints until his skin went numb. They waited in vain for him to talk, and tried again.

“They beat me with sticks. They hit me with their hands, they kicked me, they put out cigarettes on me, they pressed matches on me,” he recounted. “They said, ‘Dance,’ but I did not dance. So they shot my feet."

After three days they dropped him near the hospital with the command: “Tell them you had an accident.”

At least two other men from Mosyakyn’s neighborhood, a father and son who are both civilians, were taken at the same time. The father speaks about his two weeks in the basement cell in a whisper, staring at the ground. His adult son refuses to speak about it at all.

(AP Video/Vasilisa Stepanenko and Allen Breed)

That family, along with another man who was also tortured in the basement cell on Izium’s east bank, spoke on condition of anonymity. They are terrified the Russians will return.

Mosyakyn was captured again by a different Russian unit just a few days later. This time, he found himself in School No. 2, subject to routine beatings along with other Ukrainians. AP journalists found a discarded Ukrainian soldier’s jacket in the same blue cell he described in detail. The school also served as a base and field hospital for Russian soldiers, and at least two Ukrainian civilians held there died.

But the soldiers again freed Mosyakyn. To this day, he doesn’t know why.

Nor does he understand why they’d release him just to recapture him a few days later and haul him to a crowded garage of a medical clinic near the railroad tracks. More than a dozen other Ukrainians were jailed with him, soldiers and civilians. Two garages were for men, one for women and a bigger one — the only one with a window — for Russian soldiers.

Women were held in the garage closest to the soldiers’ quarters. Their screams came at night, according to Mosyakyn and Kotsar, who were both held at the clinic at different times. Ukrainian intelligence officials said they were raped regularly.

Mykola Mosyakyn stands in a room of a former medical clinic where Russian forces tortured him. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Mykola Mosyakyn shows scars on his back after torture by Russian soldiers. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

A church can be seen in the distance through an apartment building destroyed by an airstrike. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

For the men, Room 6 was for electrocution. Room 9 was for waterboarding, Mosyakyn said. He described how they covered his face with a cloth bag and poured water from a kettle onto him to mimic the sensation of drowning. They also hooked up his toes to electricity and shocked him with electrodes on his ears.

It was here that Mosyakyn watched Russian soldiers drag out the lifeless bodies of two civilians they’d tortured to death, both from Izium’s Gonkharovka neighborhood.

Kotsar was taken to the clinic in July and received a slightly different treatment, involving a Soviet-era gas mask and electrodes on his legs. AP journalists also found gas masks at two schools.

By the time Kotsar arrived, people had already been there for 12 to 16 days. They told him arms and legs were broken, and people taken out to be shot. He vowed that if he survived, he would never allow himself to be captured again.

They released him after a couple of weeks. He craved familiar faces and people who meant him no harm. He returned to the monks.

“When I came out, everything was green. It was very, very strange, because there had been absolutely no color,” he said. “Everything was wonderful, so vivid.”

Ukrainian servicemen inspect a kindergarten which was used by Russian forces. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

A man walks through a sports gym in School No. 2 which was used as a base and field hospital for Russian soldiers. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Soviet-era gas masks lie on the floor at the corridor of School No. 2 which was used as a Russian military base and torture site. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

SHALLOW GRAVE

In mid-August, the bodies of three men were found in a shallow forested pit on the town’s outskirts.

Ivan Shabelnyk left home with a friend on March 23 to collect pine cones so the family could light the samovar and have tea. They never came back.

Another man taken with them reluctantly told Shabelnyk’s family about the torture they’d all endured together, first in the basement of a nearby house and then in School No. 2. Then he left town.

Their bodies were found in mid-August, in the last days of the occupation, by a man scavenging for firewood. He followed the smell of death to a shallow grave in the forest.

Shabelnyk’s hands were shot, his ribs broken, his face unrecognizable. They identified him by the jacket he wore, from the local grain factory where he worked. His grieving mother showed the AP a photo.

“He kept this photo with him, of us together when he was a small boy,” said Ludmila Shabelnyk, in tears. “Why did they destroy people like him? I don’t understand. Why has this happened to our country?”

His sister, Olha Zaparozhchenko, walked with journalists through the cemetery and looked at his grave.

“They tortured civilians at will, like bullies,” she said. “I have only one word: genocide.”

The Kharkiv region’s chief prosecutor, Oleksandr Filchakov, told the AP it was too soon to determine how many people were tortured in Izium, but said it easily numbered into the dozens.

“Every day, many people call us with information, people who were in the occupied territories,” he said. “Every day, relatives come to us and say their friends, their family, were tortured by Russian soldiers.”

Olha Zaparozhchenko stands near the grave of her brother Ivan Shabelnyk, left. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Ludmila Shabelnyk cries while showing photographs of her son Ivan Shabelnyk. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Ludmila Shabelnyk shows photographs of her son Ivan Shabelnyk. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

Damaged and destroyed homes are visible from Russian attacks. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

MISSING NO MORE

After his final escape, Kotsar hid in the monastery for more than a month. Without documents and a phone connection to prove his identity, he was too afraid to leave.

Kotsar’s family had no idea what happened to him. They had simply reported him missing, like so many other Ukrainian soldiers caught on the wrong side of the frontline.

He spoke with effort to AP journalists, and at one point asked them to turn off the camera so he could compose himself. The AP contacted the Commissioner for Issues of Missing Persons Under Special Circumstances, which confirmed the missing person report and his identity through a photo on file. Then Kotsar’s own unit, which had left Izium in disarray, returned and tracked him down.

Kotsar doesn't know what comes next. Ukrainian officials are still in the process of restoring his identity documents, and without them he can’t go anywhere. He would like psychological treatment to deal with the trauma from repeated torture, and for now he’s staying with the monks.

“If it weren’t for them, I probably wouldn’t have survived at all,” he said. “They saved me.”

Kotsar’s first call was to the sister of his best friend — the only person in his entire circle of loved ones he was certain was in a safe place. He grinned as the connection went through.

“Tell him I’m alive,” he said. “Tell him I’m alive and in one piece.”

Holding cells are visible in a basement of a police station that was used by Russian forces to detain and torture Ukrainians. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka)

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Sarah El Deeb contributed from Beirut.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the war at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

BEIRUT (AP) — When the bulk cargo ship Laodicea docked in Lebanon last summer, Ukrainian diplomats said the vessel was carrying grain stolen by Russia and urged Lebanese officials to impound the ship.

Moscow called the allegation “false and baseless,” and Lebanon’s prosecutor general sided with the Kremlin and declared that the 10,000 tons of barley and wheat flour wasn’t stolen and allowed the ship to unload.

But an investigation by The Associated Press and the PBS series “Frontline” has found the Laodicea, owned by Syria, is part of a sophisticated Russian-run smuggling operation that has used falsified manifests and seaborne subterfuge to steal Ukrainian grain worth at least $530 million — cash that has helped feed President Vladimir Putin’s war machine.

AP used satellite imagery and marine radio transponder data to track three dozen ships making more than 50 voyages carrying grain from Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine to ports in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and other countries. Reporters reviewed shipping manifests, searched social media posts, and interviewed farmers, shippers and corporate officials to uncover the details of the massive smuggling operation.

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This story is part of an AP/FRONTLINE investigation that includes the War Crimes Watch Ukraine interactive experience and and upcoming documentary, “Putin’s Attack on Ukraine: Documenting War Crimes,” which premieres 10/9c Oct. 25 on PBS.

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The ongoing theft, which legal experts say is a potential war crime, is being carried out by wealthy businessmen and state-owned companies in Russia and Syria, some of them already facing financial sanctions from the United States and European Union.

Meanwhile, the Russian military has attacked farms, grain silos and shipping facilities still under Ukrainian control with artillery and air strikes, destroying food, driving up prices and reducing the flow of grain from a country long known as the breadbasket of Europe.

This image from video provided on Friday, July 29, 2022, shows the cargo ship Laodicea docked at a seaport in Tripoli, Lebanon. Lebanese officials rejected protests from Ukraine that the ship was carrying 10,000 metric tons of grain stolen by Russia. However, satellite imagery reviewed by The Associated Press shows the ship had been loaded two weeks earlier in Crimea, a part of Ukraine occupied by Russia. (AP Photo)

The Russians “have an absolute obligation to ensure that civilians are cared for and to not deprive them their ability of a livelihood and an ability to feed themselves,” said David Crane, a veteran prosecutor who has been involved in numerous international war crime investigations. “It’s just pure pillaging and looting, and that is also an actionable offense under international military law.”

The grain and flour carried by the 138-meter-long (453 feet) Laodicea likely started its journey in the southern Ukrainian city of Melitopol, which Russia seized in the early days of the war.

Video posted to social media on July 9 shows a train pulling up to the Melitopol Elevator, a massive grain storage facility, with green hopper cars marked with the name of the Russian company Agro-Fregat LLC in big yellow letters, along with a logo in the shape of a spike of wheat.

Russian occupation official Andrey Siguta held a news conference at the depot the following week where he said the grain would “provide food security” for Russia-controlled regions in Ukraine, and that his administration would “evaluate the harvest and determine how much will be for sale.”

As he spoke, a masked soldier armed with an assault rifle stood guard as trucks unloaded wheat at the facility to be milled. Workers loaded flour into large white bags like those delivered by the Laodicea to Lebanon three weeks later.

Siguta, along with four other top Russian occupation officials, was sanctioned by the U.S. government on Sept. 15 for overseeing the theft and export of Ukranian grain.

Putin signed treaties Friday to annex four occupied regions of Ukraine into the Russian Federation, in defiance of international law. The United States and European Union immediately rejected “the illegal annexation.”

Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov told AP the occupiers are moving vast quantities of grain from the region by train and truck to ports in Russia and Crimea, a strategic Ukrainian peninsula that Russia has occupied since 2014. Despite Russian claims to have annexed Crimea, the United Nations ruled that land grab was also illegal.

A farmer holds grain in his barn in the village of Ptyche in eastern Donetsk region, Ukraine, Sunday, June 12, 2022. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Next to a crater left by a Russian rocket, a farmer harvests a field 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the front line between Russian and Ukranian forces, in the Dnipropetrovsk region, Ukraine, Monday, July 4, 2022. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky)

Videos posted on social media in recent months show a steady stream of grain transport trucks moving south through occupied areas of Ukraine with the letter “Z” painted on their sides, a wartime symbol for Russia and its military forces. Agro-Fregat train cars have been recorded rolling through the Crimean port town of Feodosia, where satellite imagery shows trucks and trains lined up as grain was being loaded onto ships.

The Kremlin has denied stealing any grain, but Russia’s state-run news agency Tass reported on June 16 that Ukrainian grain was being trucked to Crimea, resulting in long lines at border checkpoints. Tass later reported that grain from Melitopol had arrived in Crimea and that additional shipments were expected, bound for customers in the Middle East and Africa.

A July 11 satellite image shows the Laodicea tied up at a pier in Feodosia. The ship’s radio transponder was turned off and its cargo holds were open, being filled with a white substance from waiting trucks. Two weeks later, when it arrived at the Lebanese port city Tripoli, it claimed to be carrying grain from a small Russian port on the other side of the Black Sea.

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