A Ukrainian soldier who was castrated while he was held a prisoner by Russians insisted on going back to the front line.
The survivor, aged 28, who had been a Russian prisoner for three months alongside another 25-year-old Ukrainian, revealed the horrifying experience to be worse than hell after they were both reportedly castrated with a knife.
The man has now re-joined soldiers on the front line, according to psychologist Anzhelika Yatsenko, 41, who the two soldiers were referred to after they were freed in a prisoner swap and returned to Ukraine.
‘He says he’s needed and it’s easier being in a place where there are no women. I guess, given what happened, he wants to kill Russians,’ she told The Sunday Times.
She also speculated the soldier might feel like his life was worthless after his traumatic time spent as a prisoner of war and might want to die.
Vladimir Putin’s twisted troops are castrating Ukrainian prisoners of war with pocket knives in Russian torture camps (file photo of Russian troops trained in Chechnya)
A high-rise residential building lies partially destroyed after a missile strike on January 15, 2023 in Dnipro, Ukraine
Based on her previous experience helping young men who faced serious hardship, she knew that it was likely that the survivors had both been tortured as they were suicidal and the younger soldier had already tried to kill himself.
The men were unable to tell her what happened for a month, but when they did, she went to the bathroom and wept – as it was the most horrible thing she had ever heard.
After beating the two Ukrainian soldiers to within an inch of their life, drunk Russian troops castrated them with a knife, The Sunday Times reports.
One of the victims said they did not know how they were still alive because of the amount of blood they saw.
And the sick Russians doubled down on the indignity, by telling them they were doing it so they could not have children, which Ms Yatensko described as genocide.
The older of the two men has returned to duty in the Ukrainian army.
The Russian military have used a number of inhumane and disgusting tactics during the war with Ukraine.
Russia is also reportedly using electric shocks, hoodings and mock executions on Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war, UN experts warned this week.
A group of UN experts said on Thursday they had written to Moscow raising concerns about the use of torture by Russian military forces in their attacks on Ukraine.
They said in a statement the torture included electric shocks, hoodings and mock executions and had been carried out to extract intelligence, force confessions or in response to alleged support for Ukraine’s forces.
It had resulted in damage to internal organs, cracked bones and fractures, strokes and psychological traumas, they said.
In April, a Russian soldier admitted executing Ukrainian prisoners of war by cutting their throats in a phone call, the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) said.
In the intercepted phone conversation, the serviceman, identified by the SBU as Yevgeny Suchko, who was deployed to Ukraine in 2022, can be heard describing in detail how he slit the throats of Ukrainians.
Moscow has previously denied torturing or mistreating prisoners of war and says it does not deliberately target civilians in Ukraine (pictured, Putin on April 27)
The 28-year-old soldier says in the intercepted call that there is ‘no point’ in keeping prisoners of war and that they ‘need to be disposed of’.
The SBU said it was working on bringing ‘every war criminal from Russia’ to justice and ensuring that they receive punishment.
Moscow has previously denied torturing or mistreating prisoners of war and says it does not deliberately target civilians in Ukraine.
While torture allegations have previously been levelled against both sides in the 15-month conflict, the team of U.N. independent experts said Russian forces’ methods may be ‘state-endorsed’.
The consistency and methods of alleged torture suggested a level of coordination requiring authorisation from superiors, according to UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Alice Jill Edwards, who sent the letter on June 12 alongside several other independent experts.
She said that following orders from a superior can’t be used to justify torture and that she believes everyone involved in the torture of others should be immediately investigated and prosecuted.
