Several times, from the window of her apartment in Kherson, Oleksandra (name changed) saw bodies being taken to the field. They took it out of the car, took it a little further from the road and threw it away. Like garbage. Once a woman dared to go to that place and saw in the grass the body of a thin man with black hair.
“It was obvious that he was being tortured. I looked out the window at that field and felt guilty, because I can’t do anything and tell no one about him. I left Kherson, and that man remained lying there,” says the woman and cries .
People regularly disappear in the occupied cities and villages in the south in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. More often – men.
Any experience of work in law enforcement agencies can be a reason for “detention”.
“They take him away if they find out that he worked for the police or was even just a security guard in a supermarket. That’s how many of my friends disappeared. People constantly live in an atmosphere of fear,” Natalya (name changed) says.
Her cousin also disappeared and was recently found dead with signs of brutal torture on his body.
The woman left Ukraine, and her family still lives under occupation in the south. For security reasons, we are not publishing the details of this story and her real name.
“From Stanislav, Tomina Balka and the surrounding villages on the right bank of the Kherson region, they are reporting mass detentions of men regardless of age. They are kept in pits, beaten severely. For no apparent reason. All in a row,” says Serhii Danilov, deputy director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He investigates the situation in the south of Ukraine. He has many friends and acquaintances there who told about “detention” and torture.
“My friend, a veteran of the ATO, had a screw screwed into his knee. This is often done to people there. He doesn’t walk,” says Serhiy Danilov.
At the end of April, Nazar Kagalnyak, an ATO veteran from the village of Abrikosivka, died after torture. He was beaten very badly.
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