Kremlin pre-planned and helped finance Kherson torture centres, international investigators said, according to CNN.
The network included at least 20 facilities that Ukrainian and international lawyers said were part of a calculated Russian strategy to extinguish Ukrainian identity.
“These detention centres are linked, they follow a very similar, if not identical way of behaving,” Wayne Jordash, head of the Mobile Justice Team, a collective of international investigators supporting Ukraine’s Office of the Prosecutor General, said.
The investigation found that Russian forces followed a very specific blueprint in several occupied areas, with clear patterns that point to the overarching plan of Moscow’s occupation of Ukraine.
“The first stage, essentially, is to detain and, in many instances, kill a category of people labelled as ‘leaders,’ i.e. those who could physically resist the occupation, but also those who could culturally resist it,” Jordash said.
The second stage is a sort of filtration process where the population that remains outside of the detention centres is subject to constant monitoring and filtration so that anyone who’s suspected of being involved with ‘leaders’ or organizing any type of resistance is also then identified and either deported to Russia or detained in the detention centres and tortured.”
Jordash said these methods were employed not just in Kherson, but in other areas occupied by Russian forces, such as the Kyiv suburbs of Bucha and Borodyanka. However, the lengthy occupation of Kherson allowed Russian forces to go even further.
Ukrainian and International investigators also said they discovered financial links connecting these detention centres to the Russian state.
“Those detention centres have financial links to the Russian state,” Jordash said, citing documents uncovered by the investigators.
He emphasized that financial documents show that the civilian administration which is being financed from Russia, is financing the detention centres. "So we have very clear patterns and very clear connections," he added.
Yuriy Belousov, Head of the Department for Combating Crimes in the Context of Armed Conflict of the Prosecutor General's Office, reported that Russian occupiers torture Ukrainians with electricity, cut off limbs and rape them massively.