UKRAINE, KHARKIV OBLAST, Dec. 16 — Court sentenced a Russian soldier who tortured civilians during the occupation of Kharkiv oblast, reported Vladyslav Abdula, a spokesman for the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). 

SBU says that Volodymyr Samoilov, born in Belgorod Oblast of Russia, was leading a “people’s police” on the territory of Lyptsi hromada in Kharkiv district during the Russian occupation of it in 2022. 

According to SBU, Russians created several torture chambers in the occupied territories of Kharkiv and Derhachi districts. There, they’ve been transporting the abducted Ukrainian citizens and “kept them in unsanitary conditions without food and water.” 

The court found Samoilov guilty of committing war crimes via prior conspiracy with a group of people and sentenced him in absentia to 12 years in prison. 

The trial proved that Samoilov personally participated in punitive raids of the Russian army and in torture. He, along with other Russians, tortured civilians, trying to force them to collaborate with the occupational authorities and “beat out of people” the information about locations of the Armed Forces’ defence positions and data of Ukrainian law enforcement officers. 

“During the interrogations, occupiers applied physical force, hit people’s heads and limbs with hammers, threatened to kill them, tortured them with electric shock and imitated execution,” Abdula wrote. 

Samoilov, according to Abdula, poured water on the people’s faces covered with a towel, cutting off their air supply and suffocating them. “He called this [way of torture] ‘bath day’,” Abdula adds. 

“Because [Samoilov] is currently hiding from justice, SBU is taking action to realize international judicial mechanisms to make him serve his sentence,” Abdula said. 

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