Senior lieutenant of the Russian army spoke about the torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilians
< p> Former senior lieutenant of the Russian army Konstantin Efremov, who fought on the territory of Ukraine in the first months of the war as part of the 42nd motorized rifle division, said that he had witnessed the torture of Ukrainian military and civilians by the command of the division. He announced this in an interview with the BBC.
Efremov became the highest-ranking Russian military man who publicly spoke about Russian war crimes in Ukraine. According to him, in one of the settlements in southern Ukraine, interrogations and torture continued for about a week.
In an interview with the human rights project Gulagu.net, Yefremov said that in the village of Bilmak in the Zaporozhye region, Russian troops organized “an impromptu prison in the school building.” In Bilmak, the Russian military tortured and humiliated members of the 36th Marine Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and civilians.
The deputy commander of the 42nd division for military-political work, Colonel Vitaly Shopaga, participated in the torture, Yefremov claims. He stated that he was aware of at least 20 servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine who were tortured by Shopaga. The colonel shot one of them in the arm and leg, says Yefremov. According to him, the chief of staff and the division commander were aware of the actions of the colonel.
In an interview with the Air Force, Efremov described the torture by the colonel, whose name is not mentioned in the material. Including, according to Efremov, the colonel shot prisoners in the arms and legs. During the interrogation of the Ukrainian sniper, the officer pulled off his pants and asked if the Ukrainian was married. Hearing a positive response, the Russian military, according to Yefremov, asked for a mop and said: “We will turn you into a girl and send the video to your wife.”
Efremov recalls that the colonel knocked out the teeth of another soldier of the Armed Forces of Ukraine when the Ukrainian did not understand the question of who in his unit is a Ukrainian nationalist.
The colonel also ordered Ukrainian prisoners to be kept on water and breadcrumbs, but Yefremov claims that Russian soldiers secretly tried to give Ukrainians hot tea, cigarettes and brought them hay so that they would not sleep on bare ground. Yefremov also described how a Ukrainian soldier wounded after being interrogated by a colonel was dressed in a Russian military uniform and sent to the hospital.
“We told him: «Don’t say that you are a Ukrainian prisoner of war, because that either the doctors will refuse to treat you, or the wounded Russian soldiers will hear and shoot you, and we won’t be able to stop them,” the lieutenant said.
In an interview with Gulagu.net, the Russian said that he served in the Russian army since 2013 and at the beginning of the war, he commanded a demining platoon of the engineer-sapper battalion of the 42nd motorized rifle division. Efremov was in Ukraine from February 27 to May 24, his division entered through the Crimea.
On February 24, the man, according to him, tried to quit because he did not want to participate in the war, but the chief of staff did not accept his application division Colonel Alexander Saenko. As a result, Efremov quit only upon his return from Ukraine. Now he is outside of Russia.
