Memorial Human Rights Center documents kidnappings, torture, extrajudicial killings in first Russian rights mission since 2022 invasion
From: Euromaiden Press BY MAXIM VOLOVICH
A team of Russian human rights defenders traveled to Ukraine for two weeks in January 2025, interviewing survivors of torture, freed prisoners of war, and witnesses to missile strikes. What they found confirmed a pattern three decades in the making: the same methods Russian forces used to terrorize Chechnya have been transported wholesale to Ukraine.
The Memorial Human Rights Center reportdocuments a sprawling system of kidnappings, secret detention facilities, and extrajudicial killings across occupied Ukrainian territory—crimes the authors describe as part of “a chain of wars, a chain of crimes, a chain of impunity.”
Key findings
- 40 interviews conducted across seven Ukrainian oblasts in January 2025
- Three-tier filtration system: checkpoints, collection points, secret detention centers
- Detention facilities hidden in basements, garages, hospitals, schools
- Consistent torture methods: water torture, electric shocks, suffocation, sexualized violence
- Ukrainian POWs denied Geneva Convention status, held without outside contact
- Systematic strikes on civilian infrastructure
How the “filtration” system works
The term “filtration” carries dark historical weight. Soviet authorities used filtration camps after World War II to process over 4.5 million returning prisoners of war and civilians from occupied territories—roughly one in six faced further repression. The same vocabulary and practices resurfaced during the Chechen wars of the 1990s, when an estimated 200,000 people passed through the system. Between 3,000 and 5,000 “disappeared.”
Voice of Ukraine 