“The worst were the screams in the night”: Visit to Russian torture chamber “Triangle of Sadness” wins European film prize

The place where Vitaliy Sayapin was terrified is a bare room with light green walls: six square meters, a window, a table, a sofa, two chairs. There are mugs and empty water bottles on the floor, and two empty whiskey bottles on the table. The cigarettes from Belarus, the wooden bar he was beaten with, everything is still there.

Vitaliy Sayapin, 42, an administrative officer in the eastern Ukraine city of Kupyansk, stands in the middle of the room and says, “This is where I longed for death for the first time.”

Sayapin has returned to 14 Kharkivska Street, the Kuyansk police station turned into a torture prison by the Russian occupiers. They kept him here for three and a half months. They beat him, tortured him with electric shocks, threatened and abused him. They broke his ribs and his will to live.

Sayapin survived. But many nights he is still in this room with the green walls, he says.

Now that the Russians are gone, he returns. He wants to tell what he and the other 200 men and eight women experienced in the Kuyansk torture prison. Because it is in stark contrast to Russian propaganda, which still justifies war by protecting civilians from a supposedly criminal regime in Kiev.

The high price of peace

Sayapin’s story shows how brutally the Russian occupiers act against people who break their rules or, in their eyes, don’t cooperate. It shows the price the Ukrainians would have to pay if they gave up parts of their country to Russia for peace.

Unlike many other Ukrainian cities, Kuyansk surrendered to the Russians in February without resistance. Then mayor Hennadyj Matsehora capitulated when Russian troops threatened to storm the city of 30,000.

He wanted to save the lives of the inhabitants and the city from destruction, Matsehora explained at the time. Some citizens therefore saw him as a traitor, others believed in his promise: instead of a hopeless battle with many victims, peace and stability would be guaranteed.

Sayapin did not believe him, but nevertheless continued to do his job in the Kupyansk city council. He was responsible for registering forcibly resettled people who came to Kupyansk. Sayapin insists he continued to work “according to Ukrainian law”, which included, for example, helping those who were forced to move to assert their right to compensation from the Ukrainian state. The Russian army did not intervene, he says.

The nightmare begins

Until May 28. This Saturday, Sayapin wanted to call his wife and 10-year-old daughter, who had fled abroad from the Russian invasion. The occupiers had shut down the mobile network in March, so he could not reach them for a long time. But now network reception was back in some parts of the city.

It was already dusk when Sayapin tried to reach his wife outside his parents’ house. Vain. He couldn’t get through.

Suddenly two cars approached and stopped, he was caught in the headlights. Men armed with guns got out of the car, pushed him to the ground and searched him. He broke curfew, they said, and had to come to the police station.

The Russians already used the old police station as an internment camp. People ended up here because of the smallest rule violations or because they were considered suspicious. The Russians put hundreds of them in cells that were much too small. There was only enough food and water to stay alive, says Sayapin.

“Katze’s” specialty: tormenting prisoners

The Russian military administration is said to have maintained a whole network of such torture prisons in the Kharkiv region: Ukrainian prosecutors found a total of 22 after the occupying forces withdrew from the area. According to Kharkiv Police Chief Investigator Serhiy Bolvinov, an investigation has been carried out into the exact number of victims and perpetrators.

One of the tormentors, nicknamed “Cat”, is a Kazakh citizen and attended a tank school in Kharkiv before the war. “Cat” was largely responsible for tormenting the prisoners, according to Bolvinow.

t-online tried to verify Sayapin’s information. Sayanin says he has verbally described his case to the Kiev and Kharkiv police authorities, and a written statement – ​​also “to international institutions” – will follow shortly. His fellow inmate Yevhen Sinko confirms Sayanin’s story to t-online. Sinko was sitting opposite Sayanin’s cell, said the head of the local hospital, who was himself a victim because he refused to work for the Russians. Sayanin, says Sinko, he and most of the other prisoners were regularly tortured.

“Why don’t you like Russia?”

Prison conditions were “terrible,” says Sayapin: 21 prisoners had to share a room of four, eight were locked in a one-man cell. Many had to sleep outside on the concrete floor – with no water, no toilet, no dignity. They only received emergency medical care, says Sayapin: “We were interrogated, beaten, intimidated and ridiculed around the clock.”

The very first day after his arrival, the Russians took him to the room with green walls. They questioned him and wanted to know where he works, who and where his family is, what he thinks of Russia and the mayor. “Why don’t you like Russia?” asked a soldier. They hit him on the head and threatened to hit him again. After an hour it was over.

“I just wanted to die”

The interrogation continued the next day. This time the Russians asked no questions. Three men tied his hands and ordered him to sit in the corner. They clamped wires around his ears. Sayapin says the first electric shock was so strong that he passed out.

When he came to, everything was blurry. They said, “Tell us everything!” — but he didn’t know what to tell them. They wired his toes, fingers, lips and genitals. To make the electric shocks even more effective, they moistened his skin at the contact points. “What was unbearable about the torture wasn’t even the pain, but the sheer desperation that it would never end. I just wanted to die.”

When they released him and sent him back to his cell, he couldn’t walk and his body was covered in swelling. He was interrogated four more times. Once they sent him to the yard to fake his shooting. “I was terrified.”

“Then Forget Me”

The “registration” was a particularly cruel method of torture, says Sayapin: Newcomers were “welcomed” by the guards with a stick, not hard, but always on the same part of the body, causing “excruciating pain”.

“The worst part was the screaming in the night and the uncertainty,” says Sayapin. What will happen to him, how long will he have to stay in the dungeon – questions like these became torture. “It drove some prisoners crazy,” he says.

Left to die

Then, in early September, Sayapin suddenly heard shots and explosions in the city. He didn’t understand what was going on. “We lived in a complete information vacuum.” On September 4, a Ukrainian Himars missile hit the opposite headquarters of the occupation police, led by separatists from the Luhansk region.

The explosion was so violent that the prisoners crawled under the beds, says Sayapin. The guards also got nervous and rattled the doors to make sure they were locked.

After a few days they fell silent. They did not bring food and stopped responding to calls for help. “We knew then that we were being left to die,” says Sayapin. If an artillery shell hit the prison, “the cell would become our grave.”

Liberation Day

Many were so weak that they accepted their death, says Sayapin. However, four young men managed to pull a wooden bench out of the ground, smash the only window in the room and bend the bars. They went outside, ran back into the building and opened the cell doors.

Sayapin was finally free.

He ran into the dark night, disoriented and terrified to meet his guards. But the Russians were gone. Sayapin sneaked home. A day later, on September 10, Kuyansk was liberated by Ukrainian troops.

When Sayapin thinks about the then mayor, who pretended to let the Russians into the city to protect the inhabitants from violence, he gets angry.