Allegations of Illegal Detention in Ukraine

Who gave the order to set up illegal prisons to hold military personnel and mobilized National Guard members in a house in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka, just outside Kyiv?

The leadership of the VES and National Guard, especially the minister, Vehovkam, face direct questions.

National Guard chief Pivnenko confirmed that mobilized personnel and AWOL soldiers were being held there, but no one is revealing the details of how this could all have happened.

Those detained and their loved ones reported extortion, beatings and torture, serious injuries left untreated, a broken spine, and things like that. In fact, at the time, there were between fifteen and forty prisoners with no legal status. Over the entire period,

probably hundreds passed through. There are reports of a death, but that needs to be verified.

How many such houses are there across Ukraine?

Let's think about what's going on. They held soldiers there after going AWOL, and those who refused to go to the training center or fled it.

After the SBI, Military Law Enforcement Service, and ombudsman stepped up inspections, keeping people for weeks at recruitment centers became risky, so they moved to greater secrecy and occupied residential buildings, which they hastily called temporary facilities.

Specifically, this is about the National Guard, which is part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, where there is a clear hierarchy, and simply blaming the underlings from the recruitment centers won't work.

They probably have similar buildings too.

This particular building belongs to the state Sense Bank, and it's unclear on what basis it was handed over, rented, fitted out, paid for, or how the people were fed, transported, and guards provided.

Surely, not directly by Azov or Khart, but everything was decided at the level of the minister. This can't happen on its own.

There are people organizing the funding and providing cover.

It's hard to believe that the leadership of the SBU and the National Guard knew nothing about the operation of such clandestine prisons.

The State Bureau of Investigation and prosecutors must establish who gave the orders to set it up, protect this place, and keep law enforcement from getting involved because the information had been circulating online for days before the unrest.

At first, everyone was silent. Then TSN arrived, supposedly to cover what was happening.

The reports of violations were called fake, with claims that instead of forty people, they were supposedly holding just one person there.

The all- clear was immediately spread through pro- government channels.

This is pandering to the authorities instead of journalism, tied to the funding of the telethon from the budget for TSN and the subordination of other media.

When everything came out and the dam broke, senior officials began arriving. to get publicity and pretend they knew nothing.

And all this is enemy scum. Instead of coming out right away and explaining who they were holding there and on what grounds, they stayed silent until the end.

Then they started gassing people and filling the area with smoke, and intimidating them with gunfire. Near nightfall, they brought in thugs who dispersed the crowd with batons.

There were clearly provocateurs on the protesters' side too, who blocked official buses and attacked police cars.

Someone benefits from this chaos. Even if they really are people who went AWOL or are draft dodgers, they are still people and have rights, including the right to legal certainty about their status, lawful grounds for detention, and medical care.

Otherwise, this amounts to unlawful deprivation of liberty and denial of medical care, and abuse of authority as part of an organized criminal group in captivity.

A range of serious offenses under the Criminal Code.

Russian aggression does not give anyone the right to torture people, deny them access to doctors, or offer their families a chance to buy their release. of those detained.

Separately, the possible loophole must be closed at the regulatory level, a loophole exploited because procedures for detainees after unauthorized absence are unclear.

Clearly specify who can take someone where, on what grounds, and for how long.

No gap in the law allows anyone to turn a private home into a prison. We demand investigations into extorting money from the loved ones of prisoners and holding them for punitive reasons, just to torment them.

And, in parallel, organizing riots on both sides, which clearly did not happen for no reason. Such incidents must not happen again.

I believe Vehivskyi should resign. As for Pivnenko and everyone else involved throughout the chain of command, criminal An investigation, not another internal review, which they announced.

The President’s Office, the Prosecutor General’s Office, the State Bureau of Investigation, and the Military Law Enforcement Service must take a principled stand.

Identify everyone held there unlawfully, and check the grounds and conditions of their detention, allegations of torture and extortion, and possible deaths. Identify the organizers and those who covered it up and funded it.

It’s terrifying to imagine how many more such facilities there are across Ukraine and what is happening there.

How could the Interior Ministry leadership not know about such facilities? How could the State Bank hand over a building for such a facility?

Will senior officials be held accountable, or will they just find a scapegoat?

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