[Source: Reuters]

Former Ukrainian detainees and Ukrainian officials accused Russia on Monday of systematically torturing prisoners of war and ​civilian detainees, holding captives incommunicado and subjecting them to beatings, electric shocks and sexual abuse, with thousands still in captivity.

Russia rejected ‌the allegations made at an informal U.N. Security Council meeting, with its Deputy U.N. 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 1,183 days in captivity.

“Yes … I was tortured,” he told reporters after the U.N. 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 centers 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 U.N. 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.