Group says Russian nuclear authority is complicit in torture
Witnesses describe a “network of torture chambers” at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.
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While fears of a nuclear disaster have risen and fallen (and risen again) since Russia occupied Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, the Zaporizhzhia plant (ZNPP) in Enerhodar, Ukraine, reports of torture at the site also have trickled out. Today, a nonprofit war crimes investigations group called Truth Hounds said that there is a massive network of illegal detention facilities at the plant and within the city of Enerhodar, where workers and their families have endured beatings, electric shocks, mock executions, strangulation and more.
“The sheer scale of atrocities committed by the Russian invaders in Ukraine in general and at ZNPP in particular is shocking,” the group said.
The mayor of Enerhodar, Dmytro Orlov, estimates that the Russians have detained and tortured about 1,000 people in the plant’s network of torture chambers. At least one person, a ZNPP staff member named Andriy Honcharuk, a diver at the plant, has been tortured to death, the mayor said. Prisoners released from custody said they only ate or drank if family members brought them food and water.
One unnamed staffer at the plant told Truth Hounds that he was held by men he thought were FSB (Russian security service) officers. The FSB, according to several witnesses, may have control over the torture network. Over the course of a few days, the Russians shocked the man with a TA-57 “Tapik” military field phone and beat him so severely he lost consciousness several times.
Another man, a member of the plant’s physical protection unit, told Truth Hounds that two armed men drove him into the forest full of slim pines, beat him and forced him to dig his own grave. They then shot near his head, which they forced into a bag full of diesel fuel, he said.
Yet another man described being held in an overcrowded, airless cell, hearing screams so loud he thought someone was “being torn apart alive.” The same man said the beatings with batons were so bad that one rod snapped.
While employees of Rosatom, the Russian nuclear authority that took over the Zaporizhzhia plant, are not known to have participated in the torture, survivors said that the brutality “would have been impossible” without their knowledge.
“There is clear, verifiable evidence that Rosatom, as a state-run agency, and as represented by its individual employees, has been and remains fully aware of the scale of this active torture network operating within ZNPP,” Truth Hounds said. “The sheer scale of the network and its direct integration into the management of ZNPP under Russian operational control belies any alternative explanation.”
Yet, minus the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Finland and Jordan, which cut ties with Rosatom when Russia invaded Ukraine, there are still 54 countries globally engaged in contracts and operations with the Russian agency, the journal Nature Energy reported in February.
“Doing business as usual with a nuclear giant playing a key role in the unlawful appropriation of Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant is unacceptable and cannot be tolerated,” said Truth Hounds. “Maintaining cooperation with an entity aiding and abetting commission of mass torture and being an accomplice of Russian war criminals is immoral and goes against all norms of international law.”
As of this publication, no Rosatom executives are under any kind of international sanctions.
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Atrocities in top of atrocities. And they think no one will ever know, and their judgement day will never come. Thank you for educating us, painful as it is. The world has to know.
Hard to process but essential, thank you.