Freed DPR soldiers say Ukrainians tortured them in captivity

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Soldiers from the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) armed forces recently released from captivity by Kiev's forces in a prisoner swap deal said they were tortured and verbally abused by their Ukrainian counterparts.

"[They] beat us, I could not walk... I had a hood on my head, but we had to go. Hands were tied... They morally abused us," one soldier told journalists.

"They zapped us with electricity so that we told them who was located and where, where the positions [of our soldiers] were," he added.

Another soldier revealed that his comrades would get beaten even for asking for a cigarette.

"They were telling us that we should be buried alive... They tortured us in any way they could," he added.

DPR head Denis Pushilin announced on Thursday a 107-107 POW swap with Kiev, with 65 of those released being from the DPR and Lugansk People's Republic.

In late October two eyewitnesses told Sputnik that Ukrainian security forces have electrocuted, starved, and beaten Russian prisoners of war with hammers. 

Vladislav Yegilnitsky, a member of the Donetsk People’s Republic armed forces who had endured Ukrainian torture said that the security forces repeatedly and routinely beat and maimed POWs at a prison that was nicknamed "the Gym."

"They used torture. Their favorite tool was a hammer. They slammed fingers with a hammer and used electric current," Yegilnitsky said.

Another witness, Mikhail Yanko, who is from the Lugansk People's Republic, confirmed that he saw Ukrainians torturing prisoners at "the Gym."

In addition to the ongoing torture, the prisoners were underfed; with the soldiers revealing that their ration was a piece of bread no bigger than a matchbox. 

The prisoners, furthermore, were kept in an unheated room, Yegilnitsky said. They sought warmth from under the rugs; and when they were going to be tortured, they were called up to a nearby room. 

In March, a Ukrainian doctor and head of the Mobile Hospital project in Ukraine's army, Gennady Druzenko, called on doctors under his command to castrate Russian prisoners during an interview with channel Ukraine 24.

He said he gave strict orders for them "to castrate all the wounded men because they are cockroaches, not humans."

In April, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Oleg Syromolotov told Sputnik that the Ukrainian military is instilling fear in people by showing footage of Russian prisoners of war (POWs) being tortured.

Graphic footage emerged of Ukrainian soldiers shooting Russians at point-blank range.

In one incident, a video of a Russian soldier being shot in the legs surfaced on the Internet, prompting Russian officials to condemn the incident.