On the morning of Nov. 20, 2023, Russians came to Raisa Rusnak’s home, looking for her 28-year-old son Ruslan. Four masked men threw him onto the ground and began beating him.
"Guys, what have I done to you? What do you want from me?" Ruslan shouted. Those were the final words Raisa heard from her son. She never saw him alive again.
Eight days later, she identified his body at the morgue. She was told that he had died of internal bleeding from a stomach ulcer during interrogation by the Russian occupation police. The woman is convinced that her son was tortured to death. Even the official Russian death certificate states that Ruslan died on the day of his detention — a week before she was informed of her son's death.
"He was lying there… His eyes were open, his teeth were showing. He must have died in such torment. What my child endured, I can’t even imagine," Raisa said.
Ruslan was interrogated at the former Ukrainian police station in the town of Hornostaivka, on the Dnipro River's east bank, in the Russian-occupied part of Kherson Oblast. Moscow has controlled this territory since 2022. Hornostaivka, a town with a pre-war population of about 6,500 people, was occupied in April 2022. Raisa left the town for Ukrainian-controlled territory in early 2024.
In the police headquarters on Torhova Street in Hornostaivka, where Ruslan was taken, the Russian occupation police have been operating for two and a half years. The occupiers have established a torture chamber in this building. Ruslan is one of many Ukrainians taken there by the Russians and not the only one for whom it ended fatally. The fate of many others remains unknown.
Russia has terrorized the local population in torture chambers across the occupied territories, with previous reports indicating the use of this tactic in Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia oblasts, as well as the previously occupied areas of Kherson Oblast.
One of those missing is Oleksandr Slisarenko, a local entrepreneur and volunteer in Hornostaivka. When the Russians took control of the town, his wife left, but he decided to stay and help others.
"He was responsible for a lot of people. He could not leave them. ‘Maybe you could come here?’ I’d ask him. ‘No,’ he’d say, ‘I can’t leave those grannies. It will get better soon,’" his wife Liudmyla recalls him saying.
Liudmyla currently lives in Poland. Since leaving Hornostaivka in April 2022, she had kept in touch with her husband by phone and on messenger applications. But on Aug. 3, 2022, the connection was cut off: in the morning of that day, the occupiers took Oleksandr away.
"He went out into the yard to do some chores — he came out in the same clothes he had slept in. And our house was, you could say, already surrounded. They tied his hands, put him on his knees, and began to torture him. He was beaten very badly on the spot. Witnesses saw it all. After that, he was thrown into a minibus with a bag over his head, and that was it," Liudmyla said.
From that moment on, Oleksandr’s trail was completely lost. Liudmyla does not even know if he was taken to the police station on Torhova Street. But she does know that it is common for Russians to imprison, interrogate, torture, and kill people there.
Liudmyla told the Kyiv Independent that another victim of the Russian occupiers in Hornostaivka is Volodymyr Ruchka, a driver from the local health inspection service. He was also taken to the police station on Torhova Street in the first year of the occupation.
“He just said something, something they didn’t like. They took him to the police station and beat him up. He was beaten, released, and he died the next day.”
We learned similar stories from other residents of Hornostaivka who were able to leave. At present, interviewing such witnesses is the only way to learn about Russian war crimes in the occupied territories. The east bank of Kherson Oblast is under tight control, and no one but Russians have access to it: neither independent law enforcement agencies, nor documentarians, nor journalists.
In the course of our investigation into Russian terror in the occupied territories, we interviewed dozens of people who managed to leave — some of them as recently as the summer of 2024. Most of them asked for anonymity or refused to be interviewed out of fear of the Russians. Almost all of them have relatives or friends left in the occupation who could face retaliation for these testimonies.
Torture chamber in Hornostaivka
One woman from Hornostaivka told the Kyiv Independent that a story similar to that of Volodymyr Ruchka happened in the summer of 2023 with another man, Serhii Klopot.
“He was taken right from the market. They dragged him out of the store at the market, threw him into a minibus, and two days later, he was brought to his yard and dumped. His neighbors picked him up. Two days later, he died. He was beaten very badly,” she said.
She also said that shortly thereafter a group of Russian police officers, one of whom introduced himself as "Vladimir," threatened her with meeting Klopot's fate.
According to this woman, the Russians mainly persecuted former Ukrainian soldiers and weapons owners. Anyone who showed a pro-Ukrainian position could also be persecuted. However, other witnesses added that the Russians also terrorized business owners who could be deprived of their property. This was a particularly common practice during the first year of the occupation.
"Those who had businesses were detained for the purpose of ransom and so on. It was always solved the same way: you bring money, they let you go. People's cars were taken away in the middle of the night, they came, broke into garages and drove cars away, houses were robbed," said Henadii Kryzhanovskyi, an entrepreneur from Hornostaivka who agreed to speak to us openly.
Kryzhanovskyi, too, was held in the building on Torhova Street in the fall of 2022. He was released only after he signed a statement about the transfer of his cars for the needs of Russia’s so-called "special military operation." He was able to leave the occupied territories only in July 2024.
Kryzhanovskyi was not the only one forced by the Russians to "voluntarily" give up his property. Others include the pastor of the Baptist church in Hornostaivka, Oleksandr Maltsev. In the fall of 2022, Russian forces searched the church premises, and Maltsev himself was taken to Torhova Street. He spent a little over two weeks in detention and was forced to give away his two cars.
Residents of Hornostaivka also told us that people not only from the town but also from neighboring villages and towns and even from the cities of Kakhovka and Nova Kakhovka, located tens of kilometers away, were brought to and held in the police station on Torhova Street.
Olha (name changed) from the village of Kairy, eight kilometers from Hornostaivka, said that the Russians also took residents of her village to the police station on Torhova Street.
“They abducted people, tortured them and beat them. And as far as I know, those people were hit with everything, even electrocuted. They tortured them like that because they (Russians) wanted to show us that they were the masters and we were the simple people who must obey them. People said: they’ve tried everything, except for one — putting electrodes under the nails,” said the woman who left Kairy in the summer of 2024.
Olha also said that Russians could punish Ukrainians in the village even for saying “Glory to Ukraine,” a Ukrainian national salute.
"One man was taken by the arms and taken away. A week later, maybe a little more, we were told that he was found, and that they had killed him. Another woman had a birthday, was a little drunk, went to the store, and said, 'Glory to Ukraine, Glory to the Heroes.' The Russian soldiers looked at each other, did not touch her at first. When the woman had just crossed the threshold to leave the store, they took her by her arms and stuffed her into a car... And I don't know whether she is alive or not, because the woman is missing too,” Olha said.
All of the testimonies we gathered paint a picture of systemic terror, with its epicenter in the torture chamber in Hornostaivka. This terror apparently began in August 2022 — and continues to this day. Ruslan Rusnak, who was most likely tortured to death on Torhova Street in November 2023, was not the only one taken by the Russians in the town at that time. The same month, brothers Ivan and Anton Shtepa, as well as Denys Shum, were held there, too. It is not known where they are now.
The faces of Russian terror
It was the case of Ruslan Rusnak that allowed us to identify the Russian police officers involved in his death and the terror of the local population. In February 2024, one of the Russian anonymous Telegram channels reported that in connection with his death, Russian law enforcement agencies were prosecuting five police officers from Hornostaivka for “abuse of office.” The message included the names and initials of these police officers.
It was easy enough to identify one of them — Andrey Polevshchikov, who was the head of the Russian police department in occupied Hornostaivka at the time of Ruslan Rusnak's death. A man very similar to him can be seen in a video shot in the town back in August 2023. In October, he spoke to a Russian propaganda media outlet about the work of the police.
"Citizens are happy to cooperate with the police because they see us as a helping hand. Initially, of course, you could see that the population was cautious of police officers, but when they saw our work in action, they welcomed us," Polevshchikov said in the video.
Other names mentioned in this message from the anonymous Telegram channel were "V. Pliukhin, V. Merkurov, I. Pimenov, and A. Denisov." We were able to identify Russian policemen Igor Pimenov and Vasily Merkurov but found no confirmed connection to Hornostaivka.
In the case of "V. Pliukhin," we decided to try out the name "Vladimir" ("Volodymyr" in Ukrainian) as standing for "V," since several residents of Hornostaivka gave us this name in connection with the terror of Russian police officers. This is how we learned about Volodymyr Pliukhin, a former Ukrainian police officer from Zaporizhzhia Oblast who defected to Russia at the beginning of the full-scale invasion. In the video mentioned earlier, Polevshchikov says, among other things, that a police officer from Zaporizhzhia Oblast has joined the staff of the Hornostaivka police station.
We showed a photo of Volodymyr Pliukhin, found on the Internet, to several residents of Hornostaivka. Two of them recognized the policeman as the one who had participated in the terror in the town. One witness pointed out that this person was the "Vladimir" who threatened her with the fate of Serhii Klopot, who was tortured to death. Another witness, who was imprisoned in the police station of Hornostaivka, told us that this man was guarding the captives in Torhova Street in December 2022 — and said to them that he was from Zaporizhzhia Oblast.
We also learned the developments of the "abuse of office" charge against these policemen. Under the pretense of an association of former Russian police officers, we called Polevshchikov and offered to support him. He told us that the case had been opened on Feb. 1, 2024, almost two and a half months after Ruslan Rusnak's death. However, according to Polevshchikov, he no longer needs any help.
"The case has already been suspended. It will be terminated due to the injury. I signed a (military) contract and joined the ‘special military operation.’ I'm home already with an injured arm and leg. We came across a landmine," Polevshchikov told us in a phone conversation.
He added that all the employees of the Russian-run Hornostaivka police station who had been prosecuted in the case joined the military and were wounded in action with him.
By signing contracts to participate in the Russian-Ukrainian war and being "wounded in action," the Russian policemen from Hornostaivka, in fact, avoided any responsibility for Ruslan Rusnak's death.
When Raisa Rusnak learned of the Russian law enforcement investigation into her son's death, she did not believe in Russian justice. "I think it was just a pretense, that's all," she told us.
There are no great hopes for the official Ukrainian investigation, either. Law enforcement officers can't enter the occupied territory, they don't have access to the bodies to conduct all the necessary forensic examinations, and they can't interview witnesses on the spot. As for interviewing people who have managed to leave, they often face the same obstacle as journalists and documenters: people are too afraid to testify.
Meanwhile, Russian terror continues on the occupied east bank of Kherson Oblast. And though some residents were lucky to have managed to flee, it is notoriously difficult for Ukrainians to leave the occupied territory. Ruslan Rusnak tried to do so in 2022, but the Russians would not let him out because of his former service in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Hennadii Kryzhanovskyi, an entrepreneur from Hornostaivka, was able to leave on his second attempt.
Olha from the village of Kairy managed to leave with her husband and children. But while crossing the border, Russians beat her husband and threatened him with murder and her with sexual violence.
Even those who leave the occupied territories often deal with the trauma from Russian terror, either from what they have experienced themselves or from what their relatives and friends have endured.
Liudmyla Slisarenko said she constantly thinks about her husband, whose fate has been unknown for more than two years. "My grandson is growing up. His other grandfather has been dead for some time. I want Oleksandr to see his grandson grow up," she said, barely holding back tears.
For Raisa Rusnak, the Russian occupation terror took away her son, her home, and justice, leaving nothing but nightmares.
"I moved to my daughter's place and have given her no rest. I have cried day and night. I imagine how they are killing my child, and I get scared. In my nightmares, I now see my daughter being abducted or my second son taken away. And I scream at night, I disturb everyone's sleep. I cry and scream at night. That's it."
Olesia Bida
