The most senior Russian official to date reveals gruesome details of torture in Ukraine: prisoners were shot in the limbs, deafened with gunshots next to both ears and sexually assaulted with a mop handle

The longest-serving Russian officer ever to expose the horrors of war in Ukraine has described brutal torture, rape and executions by Kremlin forces.

Konstantin Yefremov, a former military man who has since fled the war and Russia, said he witnessed Moscow’s sadistic tactics against the military twice a day during Vladimir Putin’s murderous campaign.

The former first lieutenant, who tried to resign from the army several times before being fired for refusing to return to Ukraine, is now considered a traitor and defector by Moscow after leaving his country in the Zaporizhya region served.

He told the BBC how prisoners were shot in the limbs, stripped and humiliated as part of Putin’s dehumanizing crusade against Kiev’s troops.

Yefremov arrived in Crimea on February 10 last year, before the war broke out, as head of a demining unit of the 42nd motorized rifle division for “military exercises”.

After seeing the ‘Z’ tanks roll in, the officer did not want to be part of the barbaric invasion and tried to resign, only to be told that he would be sentenced to 10 years in prison for desertion.

He was given temporary responsibility for a rifle platoon and ordered to move north of the Crimea to Melitopol on 27 February.

The officer described how his comrades looted everything they could find from Ukrainian homes, including bicycles, axes and even a lawnmower.

They then moved to a “logistics headquarters” in Bilmak, northeast of Melitopol, where Ukrainian prisoners were held.

He recalls: “One of them admitted that he was a sniper. Hearing this, the Russian colonel lost his mind. He beat him, pulled down the Ukrainian’s pants and asked if he was married.

“Yes,” replied the prisoner. “Then somebody bring me a mop,” said the colonel. “We’ll turn you into a girl and send the video to your wife.”

Ukrainian soldiers dug a trench near Bakhmut during the Russian invasion yesterday

Ukrainian rescue workers work at the scene after a nighttime rocket attack on a residential area in Kramatorsk

A police officer stands guard near an apartment building destroyed by a Russian missile attack

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On another occasion, the colonel asked a prisoner to give the names of all Ukrainian nationalists in his unit, but he did not understand the question.

When he did not give the desired answer, Russian captors knocked out his teeth.

They asked him to put on a blindfold and warned that they would shoot him in the head in three points.

The twisted soldiers then shot in the side of his head next to his ears, deafening the pleading Ukrainian.

During an interrogation, a colonel shot a prisoner in the arm and leg just below his knee, hitting a leg.

After Yefremov helped him to bandage it, he realized that the Ukrainian would die of blood loss if he was not treated immediately.

But to avoid their “crazy” colonel, they dressed the enemy fighter in a Russian uniform and sent him to the hospital.

Yefremov said: “We told him, ‘Don’t say that you are a Ukrainian prisoner of war, because either the doctors will refuse to treat you, or the wounded Russian soldiers will hear you and shoot at you, and we will not going. to be able to treat you. . Stop them.”

The Russians were ordered to give only water and crackers to the captured Ukrainians to survive and sleep on the bare ground, Yefremov said.

But he secretly tried to give them tea and cigarettes and threw hay to sleep at night when no one could see.

The UN human rights office says it has found cases of torture committed by both Russia and Ukraine during the war.

Yefremov arrived in Crimea on February 10 last year, before the war broke out, as head of a demining unit of the 42nd motorized rifle division for “military exercises”.

Ukrainian soldiers fire a mortar at Russian positions near the town of Soledar

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Matilda Bogner, head of the United Nations monitoring team in Ukraine, said: “If we compare the assaults, torture or ill-treatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war, it usually happens at almost every stage of detention.

“And for the most part, internment conditions are worse in many parts of Russia or the occupied Ukraine.”

She said Ukrainians were subjected to electric shocks, hangings and brutal beatings during interrogations.

Ukraine is investigating more than 58,000 possible Russian war crimes – murders, kidnappings, indiscriminate bombings and assaults – allegedly committed during the invasion.

Reporting by The Associated Press and Frontline, compiled into a public database, has independently confirmed more than 600 incidents that appear to violate martial law.

Some of these attacks were massacres that killed dozens or hundreds of civilians and together may account for thousands of individual war crimes.

“Ukraine is a crime scene,” said Karim Khan, chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

But Ukrainian authorities face huge challenges in gathering impenetrable evidence in a war zone, and the vast majority of suspected war criminals have fled and are safe behind Russian lines.

Throughout the war, Russian leaders denied allegations of brutality.

Rescuers remove debris as they search for survivors at a destroyed apartment building hit by a rocket in central Kramatorsk on February 1

Moscow’s ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, said no civilians were tortured or killed in the Kiev suburb of Bucha, despite the mountain of evidence of the atrocities.

“Not a single resident suffered acts of violence,” he said, calling the photos and videos of dead bodies on the streets “a gross forgery” staged by the Ukrainians.

Experts say Russia under President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly ignored the legal rules contained in the Geneva Conventions, a series of treaties that determine how warring countries should treat each other’s citizens, and the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court and contains specific laws definitions of war. crimes and crimes against humanity.

“These abuses are not the actions of rogue states; Rather, they are part of a deeply disturbing pattern of abuse consistent with what we have seen from Russia’s past military actions in Chechnya, Syria and Georgia,” said Beth Van Schaack, the US ambassador for global criminal justice.

But experts say Putin and other senior Russians are unlikely to be brought to justice unless there is a revolution in Moscow to topple the regime, either in Ukraine or in The Hague.