Russia is holding an estimated 16,000 civilians in arbitrary detention at 180 separate facilities. Taganrog was the most notorious.
Some weeks after being detained as she attempted to leave a Russian-occupied part of Ukraine in January 2023, Yelyzaveta Shylyk was given a polygraph test. As her interrogators attached the lie detector's wires to her, they calmly issued a threat about what would happen if she failed the test: "You'll go to a place where you'll regret being born."
That place, she would later find out, had a name: Sizo number 2, a pre-trial detention centre in the southern Russian city of Taganrog.
Prior to the full-scale invasion in February 2022, the facility held juvenile inmates and mothers with young children. After the outbreak of hostilities, it was repurposed as a torture centre for Ukrainian captives, and it has since emerged as the darkest link in a network of detention centres across Russia and occupied Ukraine.
Guards subjected not only combatants but also civilians to sustained violence and torture. The exact number of civilian detainees is impossible to ascertain, but the Ukrainian parliament's commissioner for human rights, Dmytro Lubinets, said that as of April 2024 the number registered as having disappeared stood at 16,000.
The majority are in legal limbo and have not been charged with any crime. Their locations are often undisclosed, although information sometimes filters out via released prisoners of war. Ukraine believes they are being held at as many as 180 separate sites.
The Guardian and its reporting partners have identified the systematic use of torture at 29 of these sites - 18 in Russia and 11 in Russian-occupied territories. The most common methods used include electric shocks, waterboarding, mock executions, blows with wooden and metal hammers, and repeated beatings on the same body part, alongside bizarre humiliations such as a person being tied up with tape and then sat on as "human furniture".
Detainees have also reported a ban on speaking Ukrainian, severe food rationing, and being goaded to take their own lives. The worst of these sites have seen multiple fatalities.
The use of torture to extract information or false confessions appears to have been organised and sanctioned by Moscow at the highest levels.
These are the findings of the Viktoriia project, an investigation over six months involving 13 media outlets, including the Guardian, the Washington Post and Le Monde, led by the French group Forbidden Stories.
Named for the Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna, who died in custody after spending months in Taganrog, it draws on more than 50 interviews with some of those who survived Russian captivity and with the families of some of those still held. Legal sources operating inside Russia and the occupied territories have also shared information, as have prison officials who resigned from the service in distress over what they had witnessed. Taken together, a picture emerges of a brutal and systemic assault on Ukrainian prisoners.
"It is clear to me that torture is part of the Russian war policy and apparatus, both of Ukrainian civilians as well as of captured prisoners of war," the UN's special rapporteur on torture, Alice Edwards, said in an interview. "It's being applied across all regions occupied by the Russian Federation, in all types of detention facilities. That level of organisation can only be approved at the highest levels."
The birthplace of Russia's cherished playwright Anton Chekhov, Taganrog is a quiet city on the Azov Sea. It is the closest Russian city to Mariupol, which was occupied by Moscow's forces in May 2022 after fierce fighting. In the months after Mariupol fell, Russia transferred some of its most high-value prisoners to Taganrog, including soldiers from the Azov brigade who had defended the city. They featured heavily in Russian propaganda about the war as "neo-Nazis", and Moscow had promised to hold show trials for them. Satellite imagery shows that as the prison filled up with Ukrainians, during the summer of 2022 it was reinforced with new steel roofs.
The violence at Taganrog began on arrival. The first Ukrainian prisoners were sent there in April 2022, often tied up and blindfolded onboard military trucks daubed with the Z symbol. Most were subjected to a "welcoming" procedure known as "reception", where guards would punch, kick and beat them with batons.
"This is a sacred ritual for them. Blindfolded, with your hands tied and your head bowed low, you are ordered to walk, and every dog standing there considers it necessary to hit you with something," said Volodymyr Labuzov, the chief medic of a Ukrainian marine brigade, who arrived in Taganrog in April 2022.
Over time, civilians were also taken to Taganrog, symbolic of a system that has blurred the lines between combatants and supposed "hostile elements" among the civilian population in occupied territories.
Before 2022, the facility had held about 400 Russian detainees, but reports of overcrowded cells as well as analysis of its food procurement contracts suggest it may have held many more Ukrainian prisoners at the peak of its operations.
A typical meal at Taganrog was about four and a half spoonfuls of food, according to former detainees. One counted a serving of pasta containing 15 small pieces. Sometimes they were given fish, but it was mixed with bones and entrails. Some would not eat during the day, saving their rations for a single evening meal just to feel full enough to sleep normally. Labuzov said men typically lost up to 25kg (4st) during detention.
Using detailed testimonies from six former detainees, plus photographs and public information such as construction contracts, the collaboration produced a 3D model of the prison and reconstructed the torture rooms, interrogation room and cells.
To help map the layout, former detainees, who were often blindfolded during interrogations, used techniques such as remembering the number of steps taken to go between rooms.
After the "reception", the violence continued, with regular beatings during the twice-daily cell searches and, most viciously, during interrogations. Two buildings were identified as the main torture sites inside Taganrog. Former inmates recalled hearing the screams coming from these areas.
Serhiy Taranyuk, a former Ukrainian marine detained in Taganrog, said he was often interrogated in a room sparsely furnished with a chair and a table. "You go in, you are immediately thrown on the floor, you start to get beat and cut ... Then, when you are ready to tell them something, they tell you to sit down," he said. Taranyuk said he was forced into making a false confession.
All Ukrainian prisoners who passed through Taganrog reported horrifying and sustained torture, including civilians and female prisoners. Shylyk, a former soldier who was a civilian at the time of her detention, was beaten with batons all over her body, subjected to electric shocks, threatened with rape and attacked with dogs. Oleksandr Maksymchuk, a prisoner of war who spent 21 months in Taganrog across two separate stints, wrote in testimony obtained by the Guardian of repeated beatings, electric shocks, suffocation and a technique where guards wrapped prisoners from head to toe in sticky tape and then "used them as human furniture".