Again with the false equivalence, here is a post with real fascist stuff, simply compare with the other article.
Torture Is a Russian Tactic in Occupied Ukraine, Civilians Say
Moscow is employing a variety of tactics, including torture and forced Russian citizenship, to try to obliterate Ukrainian identity, former detainees and human rights groups say.
Yevheny’s harsh treatment is just one example of a colonialist repression Russia is enforcing across the Ukrainian territory it controls, a system comprising a gulag of more than 100 prisons, detention facilities, informal camps and basements that is reminiscent of the worst Soviet excesses.
Research by a team of reporters involving dozens of interviews with former detainees, human rights organizations and Ukrainian officials from the Office of the General Prosecutor, the intelligence service and ombudsmen, reveals a highly institutionalized, bureaucratic and frequently brutal system of repression run by Moscow to pacify an area of 40,000 square miles in Ukraine, roughly the size of Ohio.
The abuses almost always occur unseen and unheard by the outside world, as Russia-controlled areas are largely inaccessible to independent journalists and human rights investigators. But human rights organizations and Ukrainian prosecutors and government officials have managed to monitor the situation closely, drawing on accounts from civilians who are either still living there or who have found a way to leave.
The ultimate aim of Moscow’s efforts, rights advocates said, is to extinguish Ukrainian identity through such tactics as propaganda, re-education, torture, forced Russian citizenship and sending children to live in Russia.
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Ukrainians who have escaped Russian occupation said it was like living in a cage, where travel is restricted and many live in fear of arbitrary violence or detention. Information is controlled and inhabitants are subjected to relentless propaganda in the media, in schools and in the workplace.
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At the time of the invasion, Yevheny, who, like others in this article, asked that only his first name be published for security reasons, was living by the sea in southern Ukraine. At first, he said in an interview earlier this year, Russian troops did not even enter his small coastal town.
But 10 months later, in December 2022, eight masked, uniformed men came looking for him. In the subsequent interrogation, he said, he was punched, beaten with a crowbar and subjected to water boarding and near suffocation with a plastic bag.
For six weeks after that beating he could not lie down, and he could only sleep sitting up in a chair. “My legs, my buttocks, everything from the waist down was black,” he said. “All my limbs, all the muscles, were not working. The skin on my arms was all cracked.”
It took him eight months to recover with the help of a local doctor, who told him he was not the only person to have been tortured in that basement, Yevheny said.
Rights organizations and Ukrainian officials working in the southern regions said they had collected many similar accounts. Yurii Sobolevsky, first deputy chairman of the Kherson Regional Council, said he personally knew of dozens of cases of enforced disappearances, detentions and beatings in the occupied part of his region.
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Ukrainian prosecutors and a United Nations special rapporteur have documented hundreds of abuses occurring under Russian occupation from enforced disappearances, summary executions of civilians, unlawful detention, torture and sexual violence.
The first cases of torture of Ukrainians in detention emerged 10 years ago, when Moscow-backed separatists seized power in parts of the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. Alice Jill Edwards, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture, said last year that torture and sexual assault by Russian soldiers of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers had reached a level of a systematic, state-endorsed policy.
Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Kyiv-based Center for Civil Liberties, which has documented human rights abuses since 2014 and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, said, “There is a clear goal to this violence, this cruelty,” noting that it was “a tactic of war, to keep the territorial occupation under their control.”
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Oleksii, 43, a Ukrainian welder, was held in three separate places of detention in Donetsk in 2015. After a week of brutal beatings by different groups he was left for dead outside the city.
He told his story after crossing the border into Ukraine in April with his wife, Olena, 39, their five children and their dog, Czar.
Twice displaced in the last decade, they first fled occupied Donetsk in 2015. Oleksii sent the family ahead to live in a Ukraine-controlled region, but was detained by the local police before he could follow them.
He was held for a week, he said, repeatedly beaten into unconsciousness. But he remembers his last interrogator, a Russian with a red beard, who removed the hood covering from Oleksii’s head and offered him a last wish. Oleksii asked for a call to his relatives and a cigarette. “He gave me a cigarette but no call,” Oleksii said.
“Then he said, ‘This is it.’ He broke my fingers, broke my nose. Only two ribs were not broken,” Oleksii added.
When he regained consciousness, Oleksii found himself in the half light of dawn or dusk, he could not tell which, in a sprawling field surrounded by dead and decaying bodies. “There were dozens of them,” he said. “They had been there for a long time.”
Unable to walk, he began to crawl out of the dumping ground and surprised a woman collecting bottles in a wheelbarrow. She screamed and ran off but returned the next day with her husband and daughter. They took him to their home in the wheelbarrow and nursed him back to health. A week later, volunteers helped him escape to Ukrainian-held territory.
