Investigation: Russians carry out systemic terror in occupied part of Kherson Oblast

On the morning of Nov. 20, 2023, Russians came to Raisa Rusnak’s home, looking for her 28-year-old son Ruslan. Four masked men threw him onto the ground and began beating him.

"Guys, what have I done to you? What do you want from me?" Ruslan shouted. Those were the final words Raisa heard from her son. She never saw him alive again.

Eight days later, she identified his body at the morgue. She was told that he had died of internal bleeding from a stomach ulcer during interrogation by the Russian occupation police. The woman is convinced that her son was tortured to death. Even the official Russian death certificate states that Ruslan died on the day of his detention — a week before she was informed of her son's death.

"He was lying there… His eyes were open, his teeth were showing. He must have died in such torment. What my child endured, I can’t even imagine," Raisa said.

Ruslan was interrogated at the former Ukrainian police station in the town of Hornostaivka, on the Dnipro River's east bank, in the Russian-occupied part of Kherson Oblast. Moscow has controlled this territory since 2022. Hornostaivka, a town with a pre-war population of about 6,500 people, was occupied in April 2022. Raisa left the town for Ukrainian-controlled territory in early 2024.

In the police headquarters on Torhova Street in Hornostaivka, where Ruslan was taken, the Russian occupation police have been operating for two and a half years. The occupiers have established a torture chamber in this building. Ruslan is one of many Ukrainians taken there by the Russians and not the only one for whom it ended fatally. The fate of many others remains unknown.

Russia has terrorized the local population in torture chambers across the occupied territories, with previous reports indicating the use of this tactic in Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, as well as the previously occupied areas of Kherson Oblast.

One of those missing is Oleksandr Slisarenko, a local entrepreneur and volunteer in Hornostaivka. When the Russians took control of the town, his wife left, but he decided to stay and help others.

"He was responsible for a lot of people. He could not leave them. ‘Maybe you could come here?’ I’d ask him. ‘No,’ he’d say, ‘I can’t leave those grannies. It will get better soon,’" his wife Liudmyla recalls him saying.

Liudmyla currently lives in Poland. Since leaving Hornostaivka in April 2022, she had kept in touch with her husband by phone and on messenger applications. But on Aug. 3, 2022, the connection was cut off: in the morning of that day, the occupiers took Oleksandr away.

"He went out into the yard to do some chores — he came out in the same clothes he had slept in. And our house was, you could say, already surrounded. They tied his hands, put him on his knees, and began to torture him. He was beaten very badly on the spot. Witnesses saw it all. After that, he was thrown into a minibus with a bag over his head, and that was it," Liudmyla said.

From that moment on, Oleksandr’s trail was completely lost. Liudmyla does not even know if he was taken to the police station on Torhova Street. But she does know that it is common for Russians to imprison, interrogate, torture, and kill people there.

Liudmyla told the Kyiv Independent that another victim of the Russian occupiers in Hornostaivka is Volodymyr Ruchka, a driver from the local health inspection service. He was also taken to the police station on Torhova Street in the first year of the occupation.

“He just said something, something they didn’t like. They took him to the police station and beat him up. He was beaten, released, and he died the next day.”

We learned similar stories from other residents of Hornostaivka who were able to leave. At present, interviewing such witnesses is the only way to learn about Russian war crimes in the occupied territories. The east bank of Kherson Oblast is under tight control, and no one but Russians have access to it: neither independent law enforcement agencies, nor documentarians, nor journalists.

In the course of our investigation into Russian terror in the occupied territories, we interviewed dozens of people who managed to leave — some of them as recently as the summer of 2024. Most of them asked for anonymity or refused to be interviewed out of fear of the Russians. Almost all of them have relatives or friends left in the occupation who could face retaliation for these testimonies.

Torture chamber in Hornostaivka

One woman from Hornostaivka told the Kyiv Independent that a story similar to that of Volodymyr Ruchka happened in the summer of 2023 with another man, Serhii Klopot.

“He was taken right from the market. They dragged him out of the store at the market, threw him into a minibus, and two days later, he was brought to his yard and dumped. His neighbors picked him up. Two days later, he died. He was beaten very badly,” she said.

She also said that shortly thereafter a group of Russian police officers, one of whom introduced himself as "Vladimir," threatened her with meeting Klopot's fate.

According to this woman, the Russians mainly persecuted former Ukrainian soldiers and weapons owners. Anyone who showed a pro-Ukrainian position could also be persecuted. However, other witnesses added that the Russians also terrorized business owners who could be deprived of their property. This was a particularly common practice during the first year of the occupation.

"Those who had businesses were detained for the purpose of ransom and so on. It was always solved the same way: you bring money, they let you go. People's cars were taken away in the middle of the night, they came, broke into garages and drove cars away, houses were robbed," said Henadii Kryzhanovskyi, an entrepreneur from Hornostaivka who agreed to speak to us openly.

Kryzhanovskyi, too, was held in the building on Torhova Street in the fall of 2022. He was released only after he signed a statement about the transfer of his cars for the needs of Russia’s so-called "special military operation." He