Second foreign civilian tortured to death while in detention in Russian city of Taganrog

A Polish citizen who was detained by Russian forces while travelling through eastern Ukraine in 2023 died in a pretrial detention centre in the southern Russian city of Taganrog later the same year after being tortured by prison guards, Polish daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza has reported.

Responding to an official request for information, Russia’s Foreign Ministry recently informed the Polish Foreign Ministry that Krzysztof Galos had died in Taganrog Pretrial Detention Centre No. 2, Galos’s son Paweł told Gazeta Wyborcza.

Telling people he wanted to “see what was going on there”, Galos, a postal worker from Kraków, travelled to Ukraine in April 2023 where he visited the southern Odesa and the southeastern Kherson regions, both of which were under Ukrainian control.

Subsequently, however, Ukrainian troops prevented Galos from attempting to reach the Russian-occupied city of Enerhodar in the Zaporizhzhia region, where he claimed his girlfriend was planning to meet him. Though the Ukrainian soldiers forced him to turn back, Galos somehow eventually made it to Enerhodar on his own, where he was detained by the occupying Russian forces.

After being transported to Russia’s Rostov region, Galos was placed in Taganrog’s Pretrial Detention Centre No. 2, according to independent Ukrainian media outlet Slidstvo.info. Ukrainian prisoners of war held in the same facility told the outlet that a Polish national had died after being tortured, something that was confirmed by human rights organisation Memorial.

One of the Ukrainian servicemen in captivity with Galos told Vot Tak, a Russian- language media outlet based in Warsaw, that on one occasion Galos had been brutally kicked and beaten with sticks for looking out of his cell window into a courtyard where he could see the prison guards without their faces covered.

According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, Galos died of natural causes due to “cardiomyopathy of unknown aetiology, which led to the development of cerebral oedema, pulmonary oedema and acute cardiovascular failure” on 4 June 2023 and was buried in Taganrog the following month.

Taganrog’s Pretrial Detention Centre No. 2 was also where Ukrainian journalist Viktoria Roshchina died after being brutally tortured by prison staff following her detention in eastern Ukraine while reporting undercover from the occupied territories in August 2023.