Russian camp allegedly used for torture of Ukrainians identified in Belarus

An investigation by a group of independent media organisations led by the Belarusian Investigative Center (BIC) has identified the location of a Russian filtration camp in Belarus where both captured Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war were allegedly tortured during the early months of the war.

According to the investigation, which was published on Thursday, members of the Russian Armed Forces were found to have been present in the Belarusian town of Narowlya, close to the Ukrainian border in the country’s southeast, until at least the beginning of May 2022.

Vladyslav Yahodynskyi, a Ukrainian civilian from the Kyiv region village of Orane, told the BIC that after he and his brother were captured by Russian troops and taken to Belarus in late March 2022, he had been given the name of the town by guards.

A Ukrainian serviceman, identified just as Viktor, also told the BIC that he had been captured by the Russians in 2022 and had been taken to a “large collective farm” in Narowlya.

“They interrogated civilians there. And they beat civilians too… There was constant screaming,” Bohdan Lysenko, another Ukrainian soldier captured by the Russian military at the end of March 2022, told the BIC.

While the BIC found several locations that tallied with eyewitness accounts, documents and online maps, their real breakthrough came from a report aired on Russian pro-Kremlin TV channel NTV in late March 2022, from which the journalists deduced that the camp was on land owned by local company Pripyat Alliance.

The Belarusian Supreme Court deemed the BIC an extremist organisation in September 2023, saying it incited hatred, deliberately spread false information about Belarus, discredited the authorities, and spread extremist material.

The investigation was carried out by the BIC in cooperation with both the Ukrainian and Belarusian services of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Belarusian hacktivist collective Cyberpartisans, and The Reckoning Project, a joint US-Ukrainian project which “fights for truth and justice”.

Lawyers working for The Reckoning Project said that the actions of Russian military personnel who evacuated civilians, including minors, from Ukraine to Narowlya may have violated the Geneva Conventions.

“The prohibition of forced displacement is contained in Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention,” The Reckoning Project lawyer told BIC. “Illegal deportation or forced displacement constitutes an international crime.”