Inside Putin’s torture Gulags – electrocuted genitals and ‘elephant masks’

Putin’s men deployed terrifying torture techniques on detained Ukrainian prisoners, from the infamous ‘elephant’ mask to starvation and electrocution

Putin transformed a Russian pre-trial detention centre originally for women, children and juveniles into a torture facility for Ukrainian prisoners.

Before February 2022, SIZO-2 held around 400 Russian inmates, but was soon filled with Ukrainian inmates just months later, where they arrived tied up and blindfolded aboard military trucks besmeared with the pro-Putin ‘Z’ symbol.

They were then subjected to horrifying methods of torture, including waterboarding, electric shocks, and being tied up with tape then sat on as ‘human furniture’. Since the war, former Ukrainian prisoners have told how the Russians brought back the infamous ‘elephant’ mask, designed to suffocate its victims by restricting oxygen flow – utilised in filtration camps in occupied Kherson.

Danylo, the cellmate of Viktor Biletskyi, a soldier from the 406th Separate Artillery Brigade, endured that method of torture. Viktor Biletskyi said: “They put a gas mask on Danylo and electrocuted him to make him suffocate faster, but as soon as he started to lose consciousness, they took off the gas mask. They did not let him die: they wanted him to suffer.”

According to Ukraine, 15,000 civilians have been detained by Russia since 2022. Around 1800 are still kept in detention facilities, where they are subjected to ‘widespread and systematic torture’.

In SIZO-2, the infamous facility in Taganrog, Ukrainian inmates are often forced into a dedicated torture room, where they are handcuffed upside down in a foetal position, their knees strapped to a bar, and for 10-15 minutes are severely beaten, as reported by the Daily Mail.

One prisoner of war, Oleksandr Maksymchuk, spent 21 months in the brutal facility on two occasions, wrote how prisoners endured suffocation, incessant beatings, electric shocks, and a method where officers encased inmates from head to toe in sticky tape and then sat on them ‘as human furniture’.

Meanwhile, the chief medic of a Ukrainian marine brigade, Volodymyr Labuzov, was transferred to Taganrog in April 2022. He recalled how he was once forced into the boiler room and pushed waist-deep into a stove used to heat water, then shoved on the meat-cutting table in the kitchen, where he was threatened with a knife.

When Roman Vasiliovich Gorilyk, one of 74 prisoners exchanged in a prisoner swap on May 31, 2024, was taken hostage in March 2022, he returned severely emancipated, with his mottled skin covered with what looked to be burns and torture wounds.

It comes as the Daily Star previously reported on how Ukrainian soldiers discovered grim torture chambers filled with human skulls after they liberated Mykolaiv and Kherson from the Russians, according to reports.

Three skeletons with fractured skulls were recovered by investigators in a cellar in the town of Berislav, Kherson, and officials said they were the remains of civilians that died during Russian occupation.

At the time, Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said: “We are winning battles on the ground, but the war continues.

“Every time we liberate a piece of our territory from Russian army we find torture rooms and mass graves with civilians tortured and murdered by Russian army.”

He added: “It’s not easy to speak with people like this. But I said that every war ends with diplomacy and Russia has to approach talks in good faith.”

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