FSIN officers ordered to mistreat Ukrainian prisoners - Wall Street Journal
Since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, senior officials of the Federal Penitentiary Service have told "senior guards" that "there will be no restrictions on violence".
According to Censor.NET, the Wall Street Journal reported this with reference to three former employees of the Federal Penitentiary Service.
The former Federal Service employees described "how Russia had planned and carried out what UN investigators described as widespread and systematic torture". It is noted that their stories were supported by official documents, interviews with Ukrainian prisoners and a person who helped Russian FSIN employees leave Russia.
According to the WSJ, Major General Igor Potapenko, who was the head of the FSIN department in St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region and has been the vice-governor of St. Petersburg since November 2024, "gathered his service's special forces at the regional headquarters" to talk about the system that "was developed for captured Ukrainians."
"The usual rules will not apply, he told them, there will be no restrictions against violence. Body cameras, which are mandatory in the Russian prison system, could be switched off," the publication said.
According to the WSJ, similar instructions were given to FSIN units in other regions, which led to three years of "merciless and brutal torture" of Ukrainian prisoners. Guards used stun guns and beat prisoners to inflict maximum damage, denying them medical care to allow gangrene to develop, which could lead to amputation, the investigation said.
The publication asked the FSIN for comment, but received no response.
The newspaper identifies its sources as two special forces officers and a doctor who entered the witness protection programme after testifying to investigators of the International Criminal Court.
The two special forces officers stated that they had resigned from the prison service before they were forced to engage in torture, but kept in touch with their colleagues who remained in Russia, the article says.
A Kremlin spokesman told the WSJ that the Russian and Ukrainian ombudsmen overseeing the treatment of prisoners are in touch with each other and that conclusions about conditions in Russian prisons are unfounded.
"We need to look at individual cases," he told the newspaper.
Earlier, Pablo de Greiff, a member of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry into Russian war crimes in Ukraine, said that the torture of Ukrainian prisoners by Russians was part of a coordinated state policy.
