Ukrainian officials claim to have unearthed a “torture chamber” used by Russian troops — finding yanked-out teeth, a sex toy and a gas mask used while burying prisoners alive.
The under-siege nation’s defense ministry on Tuesday compared harrowing scenes found in the newly liberated village of Pisky-Radkivski to “a mini Auschwitz.”
It shared disturbing images, including some of an abandoned gas mask supposedly “put on the head of a victim who was covered with a smoldering rag and buried alive.”
Another image showed a plastic container with seemingly dozens of “gold dental crowns” pulled from victims.
It was found along with a sex toy that Russian troops used on villagers and captured Ukrainian forces in the “terrible torture chamber,” according to local National Security Service investigations chief Sergiy Bolvinov.
“Neighbors constantly heard screams from there,” insisted Bolvinov, who said wires and ropes were also found in the basement of the village about 100 miles outside the city of Kharkiv.
“The police are well aware of the torture of being buried alive and the use of a gas mask with a smoldering rag,” he said, without detailing how many people are thought to have been tortured and killed there.
He shared a video of officers looking around the squalid basement, where lines of blood appear to be scratched into walls. “These are the conditions in which they were being held … They were tortured here,” one of the men can be heard saying.
The National Police of Ukraine also highlighted the find as “another torture chamber of the Russian occupiers.”
“After the de-occupation, our police officers document here the war crimes … locals were kept in inhumane conditions. People were intimidated, beaten and abused,” the service said.
It also highlighted a police station in another Kharkiv village, Velikiy Burluk, “which the occupiers turned into their fortified base and a torture chamber for local residents.”
“The Russians were based here, illegally detaining and abusing local residents,” the National Police force said.
Despite overwhelming evidence, the Kremlin has repeatedly denied human-rights abuses or attacks on civilians in its so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine.
