Ukrainians held prisoner in Kherson had their hands submerged in boiling water, their fingernails pulled out and their genitals electrocuted, according to new accounts of systematic torture during the Russian occupation.
Yuriy Belousov, Kyiv’s top war crimes prosecutor, said of the more than 50,000 reports of war crimes registered with the Ukrainian authorities, some 7,700 had come from the Kherson and the surrounding region.
Investigators have discovered 10 sites in the area around the southern city used by Russia to unlawfully detain and torture Ukrainians.
The few residents that remained in Kherson during an almost nine-month occupation endured curfews, food shortages, partisan warfare and a brutal campaign to force them to become Russian citizens.
A series of interviews published by the Reuters news agency on Thursday highlighted the plight of those on the receiving end of some of the worst treatment by Moscow’s forces.
Oksana Minenko, 44, an accountant, who lived in Kherson, was repeatedly detained and tortured by Russian troops.
She lost her husband, a Ukrainian soldier, on the first day of Moscow’s full-scale invasion, when he was killed defending the city’s Antonovsky bridge.
Even though her partner had died, Ms Minenko was subjected to brutal interrogations as Russians attempted to extract details of Ukraine’s military.
“One pain grew into another,” she said, detailing how the Russians sunk her hands in boiling water, pulled out her fingernails and beat her with rifle butts.
The 44-year-old was so badly injured, she required plastic surgery and was lucky not to lose an eye.
“I was a living corpse," she said, from an improvised humanitarian aid centre.
Andriy Kovalenko, the Kherson region's chief war crimes prosecutor, said "this was done systematically, exhaustingly" to extract information on the Ukrainian military.
Mr Kovalenko, 35, was subjected to a gruelling five-day detention in August, he told Reuters.
The Russians forced him to undress and administered electric shocks to his genitals and ears.
"It's like a ball flying into your head and you pass out," he said, describing the agonising experience.
The 35-year-old said his captors interrogated him about Ukraine's military efforts, including storage of weapons and explosives, as a suspect of a partisan resistance movement.
Investigators discovered one of the largest detention facilities in the area inside a government building.
According to Ukrainian authorities, more than 30 people are known to have been held in a single room down in a basement.
Messages from victims were scratched into the wall, with one reading: "For her I live."
More than half a dozen residents claimed to have been held at another facility used to torture and interrogate, a police building referred to as "the hole" by locals.
Meanwhile, Ukraine dismissed Russian claims that the Donetsk city of Soledar had fallen into Moscow's hands after months of "fierce fighting".
Hanna Maliar, Ukraine's deputy defence minister, said the country's forces were "holding on".
Ms Maliar said: "Fighting is fierce in the Soledar direction. They [the Russians] are moving over their own corpses.
"Russia is driving its own people to the slaughter by the thousands, but we are holding on."
The denial came after Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the pro-Kremlin Wagner mercenary group, claimed Ukraine's forces had been encircled in the city.
Moscow has been fighting to capture Soledar and its salt mines since the summer.
It is seen as the only area in the conflict Moscow's forces have appeared to make gains in recent months.
New satellite images released by US-based Maxar have revealed the devastation left in the eastern town from Moscow's attempt to capture it.
Bomb craters scar the landscape and roads around the salt-producing town in Donetsk, while agricultural warehouses have been left destroyed.
Much of the damage has been caused in recent weeks as Russian forces ramped up their efforts to capture the town.
With Soledar on the brink of collapse, hundreds of civilians have become trapped in the town, Ukraine has warned.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, the governor of Donetsk, said at least 559 people, including 15 children, could not be evacuated.