| | | Russia’s ‘Call to Putin’ torture method widespread across Ukraine
UN expert says old-fashioned army telephone can generate up to 80 volts of electricity, ensuring an agonising experience for victims
telegraph.co.uk
Russian torturers use Soviet TA-57 field telephones to electrocute prisoners in occupied-Ukraine
Russian forces torture Ukrainian prisoners and civilians using a method that involves electrocuting them on the genitals and feet with a military telephone, a new report claims.
Wires from the Soviet TA-57 field telephone, which is nicknamed “tapik”, are connected to vulnerable parts of a prisoner’s body, including ears, fingers and genitals, to deliver an excruciating electric shock.
It is claimed that the old-fashioned, hand-cranked army telephone can generate up to 80 volts of electricity, ensuring an agonising experience for victims.
The torture method, known in the Russian army as a “call to Putin” or a “call to Lenin”, was described in a report that will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council on Oct 15.
Dr Alice Jill Edwards, the UN special rapporteur on torture, said “the scale is really off the charts about how many people who are detained are subjected to some form of degrading or inhumane treatment”.
Russia’s actions in Ukraine were “showing us the worst of humanity”, she said.
On Monday, Ms Edwards will make public her latest letter to the Kremlin, seeking a response to allegations of torture perpetrated by Russian soldiers against civilians in Ukraine.
Alleged treatment includes gang rapes, electric shocks and beatings to genitals, beatings while nude, stab wounds to genital areas, burning of nipples of males, the use of stun guns to the genital area and threats of castration.
Putin is personally responsible for his soldiers’ “crimes against humanity”, with torture being “part of Russian war tactics and policy”, she said.
Speaking exclusively to The Telegraph, Ms Edwards said victims of sexual torture have been male and female and have also included children.
Crimes against humanity“At no time have I seen directives from the hierarchy for Russian soldiers and others to stop torturing. That’s what I’ve asked for. Those directives do not exist.
“It’s not only on an individual level; this is widespread and systematic, amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
“It is the level of the state; it’s Putin himself and [foreign minister Sergei] Lavrov who have responsibility for these types of policies.
“The Russian state itself will be held accountable. Torture remains part of, in my view, Russian war tactics and war policy.”
Ukraine’s ministry of internal affairs says that since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukrainian police have initiated 127 criminal proceedings into sexual violence against at least 205 people.
In June, the prosecutor general’s office of Ukraine reported 363 documented cases of sexual violence against civilians, including 19 against children.
These included threats and attempts to rape and the forced watching of sexual violence against family members.
Civilians described being detained for vague or fabricated links to the Ukrainian military, or for not having a Russian passport.
Interrogations were often said to focus on the victim’s money and where to find it.
Ms Edwards’s report is based on a dossier of 10 selected cases of degrading treatment including sexual torture against civilians in Russian-occupied territories.
The victims, four females and six males, came from three regions of Ukraine, some of which were subsequently liberated by Kyiv’s forces.
One victim, a 50-year-old resident of Kherson in southern Ukraine, was detained twice in 2023 and 2024.
Over three interrogations he was electrocuted, kicked in the kidneys and sodomised with a rifle. He also lost teeth in a beating and was subjected to a mock execution.
Another Kherson resident was water boarded, a technique that simulates drowning, while his girlfriend was threatened with rape.
Forcibly held down, the victim had a cloth placed over his mouth and water tipped over him. Survivors of water boarding report feeling terrified that they are about to drown.
A 40-year-old female from Kherson was sexually molested before she and her infant daughter were threatened with rape.
Ms Edwards has been the UN’s special rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment, since 2022.
Her mandate covers all countries, irrespective of whether a state has ratified the convention against such activity, and regularly conducts fact-finding missions into war-torn countries.
She reports formally to the UN at least once a year and has regularly written to Russian authorities detailing her concerns of alleged torture against soldiers and civilians in Ukraine.
Used as a form of blackmailShe said often the purposes of torture were to obtain information or make video recordings of people being forced to sign confessions, for later exploitation.
“They are used as a form of blackmail to keep them loyal to the Russian authorities in those areas, or to instil fear in the population to make them worried about speaking out or trying to leave the areas or not do what they’re told by the occupying forces.”
She said it was important for victims and survivors to have their material documented as “justice always comes”.
“It may come very late, but the goal here is to keep the focus on these terrible violations and put pressure on Russia to stop them,” she said.
“The victims and survivors at least have that small sense that someone cares and that someone is documenting these cases for use later, potentially trials or other forms of compensation that may be paid to those victims, survivors and their families.”
She has also investigated some allegations of torture by Ukrainian troops and said “those also need to be well-documented, and perpetrators brought to account”.
Roughly halfway through her tenure, Ms Edwards worries that the international community lacks the commitment to eradicate the use of torture.
“It’s not good enough to say well, this is something that happens in wartime when people have adrenaline running through their bodies and they’ve been trained to believe the enemy are these other people.
“I think it’s really important that we go back to basic principles and states remember why they joined the UN Charter in 1945 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
“The prohibition on torture was one of the unanimously agreed prohibitions at that time in 1948. We need to remember why we have the United Nations, why we have these prohibitions and that they are sacred and significant.
“The only way we can live together as human beings across borders, different political views and different religions is if we treat each other with dignity.
“At the base of the prohibition of torture is that everyone deserves dignified treatment.
“Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is really showing us the worst of humanity.”
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