[Pages S833-S835]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

Russia

Mr. WICKER. Madam President, I come to the floor to direct Members'
attention to a very important article on the front page of yesterday's
Wall Street Journal, February 10, 2025, by Thomas Grove. The headline
states ``Be Cruel,'' how Russia tortured Ukrainians. This is a most
disturbing bit of news, and it demonstrates who we are dealing with in
hoping somehow that there will be a negotiated settlement of Vladimir
Putin's illegal invasion of a smaller neighbor that he thought was
weaker, in violation of every international law dealing with this.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent to have the article by Mr.
Grove printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:

[Feb. 10, 2025]

Exclusive--`Be Cruel': Inside Russia's Torture System for Ukranian POWs

(By Thomas Grove)

In the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the head of St.
Petersburg's prisons delivered a direct message to an elite
unit of guards tasked with overseeing the influx of prisoners
from the war: ``Be cruel, don't pity them.''
Maj. Gen. Igor Potapenko had gathered his service's special
forces at the regional headquarters to tell them about a new
system that had been designed for captured Ukrainians.
Normal rules wouldn't apply, he told them. There would be
no restrictions against violence. The body cameras that were
mandatory elsewhere in Russia's prison system would be gone.
The guards would rotate through Russia's prison system,
serving a month at a time in prisons before other teams took
their place. Across the country, other units--from Buryatia,
Moscow, Pskov and elsewhere--received similar instructions.
Those meetings set in motion nearly three years of
relentless and brutal torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war.
Guards applied electric shocks to prisoners' genitals until
batteries ran out. They beat the prisoners to inflict maximum
damage, experimenting to see what type of material would be
most painful. They withheld medical treatment to allow
gangrene to set in, forcing amputations.
Three former prison officials told The Wall Street Journal
how Russia planned and executed what United Nations
investigators have described as widespread and systematic
torture. Their accounts were supported by official documents,
interviews with Ukrainian prisoners and a person who has
helped the Russian prison officials defect.
The officials--two from the special forces and one member
of a medical team--have entered a witness-protection program
after giving testimony to the International Criminal Court's
investigators. The two special-forces officers said they quit
the prison service before they were forced to engage in
torture but kept in touch with their colleagues who stayed.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russian and Ukrainian
ombudsmen overseeing the treatment of prisoners were in
contact and that exchanges were continuing. He said broad
generalizations about Russian prison conditions are
unfounded. ``You have to look at individual cases,'' he said.
Neither the office of Russia's commissioner for human
rights nor its presidential human-rights commission responded
to requests for comment.
The ICC has accused Russia of attacking civilians and
unlawfully transporting Ukrainian children to Russia, issuing
at least six arrest warrants for Russian officials, including
for President Vladimir Putin. Other investigations are
continuing, the ICC said, but it declined to comment further.
Russia has a long history of cruelty in its prison system,
reaching back to the earliest decades of the Soviet Union,
when Joseph Stalin created labor camps for those deemed
dangerous to Soviet rule. In recent decades, Russia has taken
some steps to improve conditions, such as separating first-
time offenders from the rest of the prison population,

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and some regions have introduced body cameras for guards
after years of campaigning by human-rights groups.
But Russia's prison system remains a separate world inside
the country, with its own rules, slang and even tattoos meant
to denote authority within prison walls. Many prisons are in
remote locations where the guards act with impunity, said the
prisoners and rights advocates.
The special forces in the Russian prison services aren't
regular guards who are based in individual prisons full time.
Instead, they act as a praetorian guard that is called in to
deal with particularly dangerous situations, such as
conducting searches or controlling uprisings.
While dealing with Ukrainian prisoners of war, they were
tasked with working with local prison guards to direct the
POWs' activities. They interpreted Potapenko's instructions
at that March 2022 meeting as a carte blanche for violence,
said the two former guards. They pushed their mistreatment of
Ukrainians to a new level with the belief that they had the
permission of their leadership, said one of the former
guards.
While on duty, the guards wore balaclavas at all times.
Prisoners were beaten if they looked a guard in the eye.
Those measures, along with the monthlong rotations, were
taken to make sure individual guards and their superiors
couldn't be recognized later, said one of the former
officers.
In March 2022--the same month that Potapenko held the
meeting with guards in St. Petersburg--Russia began preparing
its penitentiary system for the arrival of prisoners from the
war. Letters went out to prison authorities across Russia
ordering them to clear out floors, wings and even entire
prisons, according to documents and one of the former prison
officials.
On the battlefield, Russia was encountering fiercer
resistance from Ukrainians than Moscow had expected. Prison
authorities were similarly unprepared for the number of POWs
they would have to hold.
Pavel Afisov, who was taken prisoner in the city of
Mariupol in the initial months of the war, was among the
first Ukrainian prisoners detained in Russia. For 2\1/2\
years, the 25-year-old was moved from prison to prison in
Russia before being released in October of last year.
He said beatings were the worst when he was transferred
into new prisons. After arriving at a penitentiary in
Russia's Tver region, north of Moscow, he was led by guards
into a medical examination room and ordered to strip naked.
They shocked him repeatedly with a stun gun while shaving his
head and beard.
When it was over, he was told to yell ``glory to Russia,
glory to the special forces'' and then ordered to walk to the
front of the room--still naked--to sing the Russian and
Soviet national anthems. When he said he didn't know the
words, the guards beat him again with their fists and batons.
The violence served a purpose for the Russian authorities,
according to the former guards and human-rights advocates:
making them more malleable for interrogations and breaking
their will to fight. Prison interrogations were sometimes
aimed at extracting confessions of war crimes or gaining
operational intelligence from prisoners who had little will
to resist after they suffered extreme brutality.
The cruelty made them more willing to submit to Russian
interrogators and drained ``any will or ability to fight
again if they are ever swapped,'' said Vladimir Osechkin, who
heads human-rights organization Gulagu.net and has helped
Russian officers from the penitentiary system leave the
country and offer testimony to the ICC.
The former guards described a staggering level of violence
directed at Ukrainian prisoners. Electric shockers were used
so often, especially in showers, that officers complained
about them running out of battery life too fast.
One former penitentiary system employee, who worked with a
team of medics in Voronezh region in southwestern Russia,
said prison guards beat Ukrainians until their police batons
broke. He said a boiler room was littered with broken batons
and the officers tested other materials, including insulated
hot-water pipes, for their ability to cause pain and damage.
The guards, he said, intentionally beat prisoners on the
same spot day after day, preventing bruises from healing and
causing infection inside the accumulated hematoma. The
treatment led to blood poisoning and muscle tissue would rot.
At least one person died from sepsis, the officer said.
Many of the guards enjoyed the brutality and often bragged
about how much pain they had caused prisoners, he said.
Ukrainian former POW Andriy Yegorov, 25, recalled how
guards at a prison in Russia's western Bryansk region would
force prisoners to run 100 yards through the hallway, holding
mattresses above their heads. The guards stood to the side
and beat them in the ribs as they ran by.
When they got to the end of the hall, they would be forced
to do sit-ups and push-ups. Each time they came up, the
guards would punch them or hit them with a baton.
``They loved it, you could hear them laughing between
themselves while we cried out in pain,'' he said. ``There I
understood fear exists only for the future, you can be afraid
of what happens in 10 or 15 minutes, you can be afraid of
what might happen. But when it's happening, you're no longer
afraid.''
Two of the longest-held prisoners of war, both Afisov and
Yegorov spent around 30 months in the Russian prison system
before they were finally released in a swap that brought them
home on Oct. 18.
Yegorov found out during his medical checkup following the
exchange that he had five broken vertebrae. He is undergoing
medical treatment for his injuries and has met with a
hospital-appointed psychologist. But he is skeptical that the
psychologist can help.
``If you haven't gone through what I've gone through, you
can't help me,'' said Yegorov.
After returning home, Afisov resisted sleep for days,
fearing it could turn out to be a dream and he would wake up
back in prison. ``Then whenever I finally trusted myself
enough to fall asleep all I had was nightmares,'' he said.
The former prison officials were preparing to start new
lives when they spoke with the Journal. They are now living
in undisclosed locations and have had to cut off contact with
people they had known all their lives.
One of them said he had always been a Russian patriot and
never wanted to live anywhere else but Russia. But after the
war began, he said, he couldn't stay in the country or remain
silent. He said giving testimony to the ICC was one way to
work toward justice.
Mr. WICKER. Madam President, it starts out by saying that in the
beginning of this war, which now has lasted almost 3 years, word came
down from the leadership of Vladimir Putin's dictatorship in Russia to
prisoners of war captured by the Russian soldiers, from Major General
Igor Potapenko: ``Be cruel, don't pity them,'' the Ukrainian prisoners.
We all know that war is hell. There is no question about it. We also
are finding out that Russia has learned this. They thought that it
would be a 1- or 2-day excursion and that they would be welcomed by
pro-Russian Ukrainians as they rolled their tanks in. They found out
very differently soon, and 3 years later, we have seen how the
Ukrainians have fought and died for their own homeland.
Also, once a combatant has been captured, there are very important
international rules and regulations and a matter of international law--
which can be punished by life imprisonment, which can be punished by
the death penalty--about treatment of prisoners of war.
This is what we are learning about what Major General Igor Potapenko
told the Russian prison officials that they could do: ``There would be
no restrictions against violence'' against these prisoners of war.
``The body cameras mandatory elsewhere in Russia's . . . system would
be gone. The guards would rotate . . . serving a month at a time in
prisons before other teams took their place. Across the country, other
units . . . received similar instructions.''
We are not finding this out, by the way, from some international
reporter that somehow got into the system and saw this.
This is information given by former Russian prison guards who were so
disturbed by these orders that they defected to the West. Three Russian
prison guards are telling The Wall Street Journal and Americans and
anyone who would listen about the horrors. This resulted in nearly 3
years of relentless torture.
Guards applied electric shocks to prisoners' genitals until the
batteries ran out.
I am almost reluctant to speak these words in public.
They beat prisoners to inflict maximum damage, experimenting to see
what kind of material would be most painful. Then, when there were
medical problems, as there would surely be, medical treatment was
withheld to allow gangrene to fester, forcing amputations.
Three former prison officials told this reporter how Russia planned
and executed what United Nations' investigators have described as
widespread and systematic torture. Their accounts were supported by
official documents, interviews with Ukrainian prisoners, and a person
who helped the prison officials defect.
Thank God they were able to defect.
This is also borne out by a former prisoner of war, Pavel Afisov,
taken prisoner in Mariupol early in the war. He was among the first
Ukrainian prisoners detained in Russia. For 2\1/2\ years, this 25-year-
old combatant, who was entitled to the protections afforded by the
Geneva Conventions, was, instead, moved from prison to prison before
being released just last October.

[[Page S835]]

He said beatings were the worst when he was transferred. After
arriving at a penitentiary in Russia's Tver region north of Moscow, he
was led into a medical examination room and ordered to strip. Guards
shocked him repeatedly with a stun gun while shaving his head and
beard. When it was over, he was told to yell ``Glory to Russia! Glory
to the Special Forces!'' and then, still naked, he was ordered to sing
the Russian and Soviet--and Soviet--national anthems. When he said he
didn't know the words, the guards beat him with fists and batons.
This is hard to read, but what did the former guards say--Russian
citizens--who thankfully have been willing to defect and come forward
and tell the truth about the vicious, brutal, illegal regime of
Vladimir Putin?
The former guards described a staggering level of violence directed
at Ukrainian prisoners. Electric shockers were used often, especially
in showers; that officers complained they were running out of batteries
too fast. Can't do this anymore because the batteries have gone dead.
The guards used police batons until they broke. Officers tested other
materials, including insulated hot water pipes, for their ability to
cause pain and damage.
This is Putin's Russia. This is the regime that some people are
hoping we can somehow negotiate with in good faith and depend on them
to keep up their end of the bargain.
The guards intentionally beat the prisoners at the same spot on their
bodies every day, preventing bruises from healing and causing
infection, and at least one person died of sepsis because of this type
of brutality.
The guards enjoyed their brutality. According to these Russians who
were guards at the facility and who defected rather than countenance
what their own government was doing, Ukrainian former POW Andriy
Yegorov recalled how guards at a prison in Russia would force prisoners
to run 100 yards through the hallway, holding mattresses above their
heads. The guards stood to the side and beat them on the ribs as they
ran by. When they got to the end of the hall, they would be forced to
do sit-ups and push-ups, and each time they came up, the guards would
punch them or hit them with a baton.
I would say to my colleagues that this is not a bunch of prison
guards gone rogue; this is a bunch of prison guards in Vladimir Putin's
dictatorship and Vladimir Putin's illegal regime that were following
orders from a high-ranking major general.
There are differences about the United States' interest in Ukraine,
but I will tell you that the countries around Ukraine--in the
neighborhood--know what they are facing, and they know, if Vladimir
Putin succeeds in his illegal war to take over a neighbor, that it will
not be the end of it. One can only listen to what we are hearing out of
neighboring countries--out of the Republic of Georgia, out of
neighboring Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Russia intends and the war
criminal Vladimir Putin intends to return to as much of the old Soviet
Union dictatorship as he possibly can.
I hope this war ends. Frankly, I have hoped for 3 years under the
Biden administration that that administration would provide the freedom
fighters inside their own country to have the necessary equipment, the
necessary ammunition, the necessary permission to defeat this illegal
invasion. But I simply, at this point, want to alert anyone who is
listening--my colleagues, anyone who is listening to the sound of my
voice in any way--to the reality of the utter cruelty, of the
unspeakable conditions that Russia uses in violation of every
international law.
If Vladimir Putin comes to the negotiating table and agrees to a
cease-fire, we need to bear in mind that he is the gentleman who has
countenanced this outrage that I have barely been able to speak about
today. Any negotiations we have with the Russians and with the current
leadership need to be done in light of the facts as outlined in this
independent report.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.