for kyiv independent, they remember this prison with horror, because of hunger and brutal treatment by its employees, here he was still running, he was still so short in height, he was still bragging that i was so small, but my kick was so sharp, the belt wound on he stood with his hand tied and a belt, there was a room where the boys were taken, where... they were tortured for several hours, they wrapped them with tape and beat them very hard, the deer park became the place of mass murder of ukrainian prisoners of war, he guides the beam of this flashlight in this direction, and i just saw that this and that until the end of how that flashlight shines, just everything is littered with bodies, you see, we were gathering information step by step about how it functioned. the prison,

its supervisors, managers and curators from russia. our team recorded dozens of interviews with people who returned from captivity and witnessed gross violations of international law. some of our interlocutors will remain anonymous for security reasons. we managed to reproduce the picture of the horrors of olenivka, albeit with some white spots. february 24, 2022, russian troops invaded the territory of ukraine, land, sky and sea attacked mariupol, an industrial city on the shores of the sea of ​​azov, for 86 days in...

the ukrainian army held the defense of mariupol under conditions of daily bombardment, 82 of which were completely surrounded. military servicewoman maryana mamonova was in charge of the unit's medical service. i found out in the middle of march, when we were already at the factory, everyone, you know, asks me questions, writes comments, how could you not know that you are pregnant, you know, maybe in such civil conditions, you would have learned about it a lot rather, we had tasks that needed to be completed, we had wounded people, we needed to evacuate, i had one test.

pregnancy, but it showed a positive, you can imagine, a positive result in mariupol, a city that is surrounded, a city that is simply destroyed by the evils of the earth, and you understand that you will be a mother, for almost a month and a half maryana mamonova saved wounded soldiers surrounded by russians mariupol even her husband, who was in another region of ukraine, did not know about her pregnancy. at the end of march, i was not sure that i would survive texted and sent emoticons, you know, there's mom, dad, there, girl, mom, dad, boy, and i thought that he, well, guessed anyway, he guessed, but... as

he told me, to accept that the idea that his wife was pregnant and he was afraid in mariupol. the situation in mariupol was getting worse every day. problems with weapons, food and water began. russian troops occupied the city kilometer by kilometer. and when we were moving to one of the combat positions, the car was stopped, and the russians stopped it the military, who, having opened the car, aimed at... at weapons and said that we are prisoners of war of the russian federation and the donetsk people's republic, this is your only chance to escape. april 6, 2022. maryana mamonova was taken as a prisoner of war together with other marines to volenivka, a prison almost 100 km from the place. of their service, at that time this

name meant little to her, almost four months remained until the tragedy, after which the whole world learned about olenivka. since the 1990s , olenivka functioned as a correctional colony for men in donetsk region. after the seizure of part of the region in 2014, it came under the control of the pro-russian occupation authorities and was subordinated to the illegally created service of execution of punishments with the center of management in donetsk. for some time , the occupation authorities held convicts there, but later the prison was confiscated. with the beginning of the full-scale invasion of russia, olenivka became a camp for... prisoners and civilian hostages from mariupol. we were brought to olennik, it was 3 o'clock in the morning or four in the morning. one of these russian soldiers said that there was a female passenger in the car, they decided

to take the first one out. i saw how our boys were received, there was a command to run out quickly. when they... run in, they are immediately beaten with sticks, from one end and from the other russian escorts with sticks and dogs come, they don't look at what to beat, they just beat, beat and beat. april 10-14, 2022. new and new groups of ukrainian prisoners of war were brought to volynivka. the so-called reception. lasted for several hours, accompanied by beatings and abuse, you they kick you out of the bus, they quickly ask your father's name and surname, then they drive you into the yard, then you sit in a so-called position on the courts, you sit in a deep squat,

you can't stand on your toes, you can't change the position of your legs, your hands must always be behind your head , back straight, head tilted, if you ask any question, you. "if you lower your hands, they beat you on your hands, because you lower them, you try to sit down, they beat you, respectively, on your back, so that you stand up, and then on your legs, which do not bend, because your legs hurt very much, really hard, and now you start to get up, fall, get up again and just like that you jog back there, further to the isolation ward. kostyantyn velychko, an aitivets resident, and yevhen malyarchuk, a businessman from mariuppol. in the first days of the full-scale invasion, they volunteered to evacuate civilians from the blockaded city. both of them were detained at checkpoints by representatives of the occupying forces and sent to olenivka, like other civilians who did not pass the filtering, a humiliating illegal check at

the exit from the occupied territories. regarding the terms, you should understand that this is a canned, abandoned prison. it was uncanned just before the start of filtration. i think we were one of the first to get there. the first building where prisoners of war and civilian hostages went after the so-called reception is dizo, the prison's disciplinary isolation cell. a dilapidated building where the sewage is constantly flowing, the smell is terrible, the floor is concrete, there are no benches, if there are any. then they are metal, everything is moldy, moldy, everything is damp and very cold. for two or three weeks we were in the isolation cell, only then we were transferred to barracks. for three weeks we rotted there

in overcrowded cells, from 21-22 people up to 40-50, when we were crammed, a new stage arrived, they immediately shoved us into... the radio was constantly playing, the light was always on, it was never turned off, we slept on the floor , on concrete, i was lucky that i took my winter jacket, it was a mattress and a pillow and a blanket for me, the average temperature at night in april-may was 5-9 degrees. there was no heating in the buildings. i fell asleep and i say: "god, i probably won't wake up in the morning because that i was simply, simply freezing." and everyone was sleeping dressed in boots, everyone who had anything, and

huddled together, you know, so that it was possible to at least, well, at least somehow warm up. without exception , all the prisoners with whom we communicated they also talked about the fact that the people of voleniv... there was a critical lack of food and water, for the first few days a piece of bread and... so much water in a glass, that's all the food, later they already started a canteen, boilers, something like thin soup began to be given, a little tea without sugar, well, it's hard to call it tea either, macaroni and even porridge later appeared, i wanted to eat all the time, all that saved us there was bread with a barn there... there were no problems, you start hiding this bread, you can't eat it all for lunch, because you have to

leave it for the evening, and i always have , you know, there were some supplies of bread, i was constantly hiding food in my pockets for some reason, i was afraid that i would not have anything to eat, everyone was sick, we were fed from one dish, about 200 people in a dizo, and for all dizo, probably 20 sets they carry around the cells, threw them, people ate, gave away the dirty ones, and the same plates were thrown, given to the next, accordingly, if someone was sick, it everything spread to all of dizo as quickly as possible. the water in the system never appeared, it was brought, it was technical, it was so-called potable. it's hard to call it a stain, it was brought in in fire trucks, it was from... you just wanted to drink plain

water to get drunk, just get drunk, instead of rinsing your mouth and spitting it out, because if you swallow this water, you will have hurt stomach or anything else. tetyana eldiab served as a cook in a unit of a motorized infantry brigade. she signed a contract with the ukrainian army a few months before the full-scale war. in polon got into the territory of one of the mariupol metallurgical plants, which was used as a shelter by the ukrainian military. when you enter olenivka, everything changes. there is no life there,

there is a broken tile on the floor, and you feel just like that tile, it was morally very difficult, to be without food, without water, without medicine, even without feminine hygiene, during... the first three months of full-scale during the war, the prison operated under the banner of the pro-russian occupation authorities. olenivka staff consisted of local people collaborators, employees of the prison system. they hid their faces, unlike the special forces who were brought in for the so-called reception of prisoners of war. they are for russia. they said that we are not there. ukraine does not exist, only they exist. and the future is only theirs, because we were

not people for them, i remember these words: you are not people, and you are not worthy to live, women constantly lived in cells on the second floor of the disciplinary isolation cell, there was a room on the first , where men were taken for so-called interrogations. tortured for several hours, these girls were constantly banging on the door with their hands , shouting, you know, stop, stop, you just can't stand the way people shout, it was so hard for me at those moments, you know, i was constantly crying, i couldn't control myself, not 5 minutes , not 10, but it's hours, hours of one, two, when at night you hear the sound of scotch being opened, you... understand that right now everyone will cry, girls, they wrapped them with tape and

beat them very hard, we didn't sleep then , we could not sleep, to this scream, scream, to this all, we could not and all, about bullying in olenivka three seriously injured defenders told at the press conference. mariupol, who were among the first to be returned from captivity. i also felt the blows, i was also beaten during the interrogations, they wanted me to sign... i wrote all kinds of statements to my command, i said that i would not do it, they started beating me with sticks, when i did nothing and i did not sign, and there were always threats to my life, i see that the boys were taken from us, because they brought boys from our barracks for two or three days beaten, their ribs were broken, well, in a very serious condition,

mariupol volunteers kostyantyn velychko and yevhen malyarchuk also witnessed the torture. this is one change, it's kyrylo and yura. this shift was the hardest, because people were brought to them who had either committed a crime in prison or needed to get some information. we called it kortyk's change, because no one called kirill kirill. not everyone even knew what his name was. why was he nicknamed kortyk, because in the first days he wore his thighs here. such a machete, of course, he did not cut his hands, but he swung, he swung, even the colony leadership had there are problems with them, they, these two guys, worked with the prisoner of war, they brought them, they beat these people, they took someone who was from the barracks, took them away, and they interrogated someone from the second

floor, you could see the corridor, because no there was a second iron door, there were octopuses from the armature, this door with a feeding trough, but there was no second door, of course, when a person was lifted from the interrogation, we were not allowed to look, there was a command for everyone to stand up, return to the wall, but when not when i managed to look from the side, and here are these people who were interrogated, they crept forward, while yura and this kord, kirilo, walked behind. the team of matilda bogner, head of the un human rights monitoring mission in ukraine, interviewed hundreds of servicemen from both sides. more than 90% of ukrainian soldiers said that they were tortured or treated cruelly. most of the torture took place

during interrogations. this appears to be the most organized form of bullying. sometimes people were tortured immediately after being captured. usually it was beatings, generally less organized forms of torture. during the interrogations, in some cases, people were tortured with electric shocks, they were also beaten, sometimes threatened, and other forms of physical violence were used, using various objects, sometimes with knives, sometimes stabbing wounds, sometimes... shooting a whole range of torture. un experts recorded the facts of torture against ukrainian prisoners in olenivka, including the most brutal ones. i cannot go into detail about this case specifically. what can i say: some of those who were tortured were electrocuted. we

looking for any information that would help identify those involved in the torture in olenivka. one of our interlocutors said that he managed to get some internal documents out of the prison. during the captivity, this person was involved in working with papers in the administrative building. we received these documents and it was thanks to them that we subsequently identified a number of employees of the colony. end of april 2022 . ukrainian troops continued the defense of mariupol at the azov steel metallurgical plant. the russian army besieged the plant.

the plant itself consists of a very large area. you can say that this is a city within a city. more than 20 km long, tasks for the defense of the city were defined there. serhii shevchuk moved to mariupol from the western region, on the eve of the invasion, along with several thousand other soldiers, held the defense in azovstal. russian troops bombed the plant daily and tried to take its territory by storm. they were used. air bombs there starting from a ton and in my case it was three tons, we miraculously survived there already. we've got we ran out of food, there was practically no water, we just drank technical water, for the last week and a half we did not believe that we would leave alive, but we knew that they would still

remember us, they would still remember us, and we are worthy of it, we stand for patriotism, we wanted to win it back to the last drop, the defense of mariupol was led by the commander of the special purpose brigade. azov, denys prokopenko. he periodically contacted azovstal with short messages. the enemy broke through the territory of the plant. heavy bloody battles are going on. i am proud of my soldiers. i thank the whole world for the tremendous support of the mariupol garrison. the situation is extremely difficult, but despite everything, we continue to carry out the order, to maintain the defense. may 16 , 2022. on the 82nd day of the defense of mariupol, the higher military command of ukraine ordered servicemen to withdraw from azov steel. more than

200 defenders of mariupol were taken to olenivka as prisoners. most were soldiers of the azov brigade, a unit of the ukrainian army, who was demonized by russian propaganda. with the help of fakes, manipulations and staged videos since 2014, russian pro-government media have been creating military bases. the image of neo-nazis, and later russia started a full-scale war under the pretext of fighting nazism, then it turned out that on our bus they were very interested in whether we had servicemen from azov, because we had one serviceman there, and they took pictures with him, they they looked at him as if he was some kind of person from heaven, but for them it was a call, that was all, then on the video broadcast talked with their parents, well, it was wild to watch it. on may 27, 2022

, a delegation of representatives of the occupation authorities and propagandists came to the prison to show the satisfactory conditions of detention of ukrainian prisoners of war. we import the surplus, purchase detergents and mattresses and store them. actually, only two barracks were renovated, exactly where journalists came with cameras, where they showed that everything here was, they say, clean, beautiful, the rest of the barracks were simply trashed, when the big stages had already begun, a considerable number of the number of metal beds with nets, half of the windows are missing, there are practically no doors. the toilets are not working. despite demonstrative visits by russian-controlled officials, conditions in the prison remained unchanged.

there were horrors in the toilet, although we got so used to them later that it was almost normal for us. a line of 20-30 people could stand there, pour everything there, there were no wicked systems, nothing. accordingly, they went according to what was happening. but a few days before the arrival of the military personnel from azov, the flag over the deer stand changed from of the russian-controlled occupation regime on the russian tricolor. almost all supervisors were replaced by russians on business trips. in addition to a few people like kiryusha, there are also a few more people there. the rest were already russians. the russian guards were corrections officers and changed every few weeks. kirill and yuriy's shift remained to work in olenivka. according to

the testimonies of the military and civilians we interviewed, they continued the abuse already on the orders of the russians. if they needed to get something, they sent these captives to dizo. they were no longer interrogated by the russians, but by the people of the dpr. we knew the names. these two people, we also knew that kirill had a tattoo on his shoulder with the image of a scorpion, and we also had a stack of documents from olenivka, some of these papers were not interesting to us, they were about lists of convicts from previous years or regulatory documents , however, in one of the drafts of the report, we drew attention to two names: shokurov kyrylo viktorovych and yurii oleksandrovych dmytrienko. we quickly identified the first supervisor, he used social media. this is kyrylo shakurov from of the occupied horlivka of the donetsk region before

the occupation of the city in... 14th year, he worked as a supervisor in another ukrainian high-security colony. we also managed to identify other employees who worked in olenivka during the first months of the full-scale war. later, we will find out that some of them also allegedly took part in bullying the military. but we could not identify kyril shakurov's partner named yuriy and began to doubt that this was the real name of the second supervisor. maryana mamonova remembers the months spent in detail in captivity my tummy, by the way, appeared in the sixth month, they started laughing at me for being one, you said you were pregnant, you couldn't see your belly, you thought that if you were to be changed in a week or two, well, as if you wanted someone fool months passed, but pregnant maryana

was not sent for exchange. in conditions of constant malnutrition, other women gave her their food, because civilians were recruited to work on the prison grounds, where they could get additional food. apples were brought to me by girls who went to work, and they ate there, well more food was given, and they brought it to the cell and shared it with me. there were days when...... we were brought breakfast at 60 in the morning, lunch at 50 in the evening, and dinner at night, in the cell there was only one topic about food, and who, who knows how to cook what. maryana mamonova and tetyana eldiap lived in the same cell for a while, and then in neighboring ones. one night, tatiana injured her leg. i got injured because some

of the girls at night... got up to go to the toilet, some stepped on it, they all slept on the floor, but some were luckier because they were so wooden pallets, you know, and we slept on the floor, tatyana still doesn't know if she will ever be able to walk fully, my leg is very swollen , and you walk apart, you walk apart, and i've been walking only on my heel for six months, i can feel my toes. the leg hurt constantly and did not heal, but tatyana was not treated, as were other servicemen. volyn residents also kept wounded soldiers captured by the russian army in mariupol. some of them had serious injuries. we had a separate bus with these wounded, all of you. they saw that

they all came out bandaged crutches, i take that crutch, he still hits with it, why are you touching it, these are wounded guys, you know, there should be a minimum of some respect for them. yurik makardchan is a military medic. one of the volunteers who agreed to be deployed by helicopter to mariupol surrounded by the russians. together with his colleagues, he rescued the wounded in improvised shelters. military hospital on the territory of one of the metallurgical plants, later in captivity, without special equipment and medicines. we had a boy who was wounded in the leg as well, and we, being there, were just on concrete, our surgeons were able to visualize the vessel that was bleeding, yes, tie it off. why is that important, huh? this manipulation made it possible to save the leg, you understand, that is, we, being on

the concrete, we are all even... to provide the highest quality medical care, why am i telling this, because this guy was returned to us in the colony a week later and the limb was already amputated, that is, we did the maximum in order to preserve it, and the russians simply cut it off and that's all, this is a demonstration of the quality of medical care, wounded servicemen were kept in the same in the same conditions as the rest of the captured defenders of mariupol. they gave us beds, but later i can't even remember how many, these are wounded, they just throw themselves on the concrete, and we are there as doctors, we walk, and i see that, for example, this wounded man has a mattress, i see another guy with the same blankets, i push them together and put another guy between them, we not only treated, but we still managed.