The prisons these men helped run are part of a detention system in which the UN human rights office (OHCHR) says torture and ill-treatment of civilians is “systematic and widespread”.

It says former detainees describe beatings, electric shocks, mock executions and sexual violence, with civilians often arbitrarily detained and families left with little information.

The Kremlin has accused the OHCHR of bias. In May this year, the UN added Russia to its blacklist of countries suspected of committing sexual violence in conflict zones, accusations that Russia dismissed as “baseless lies.”

Ukrainian authorities say more than 16,000 civilians have been taken captive or missing. Some of these cases occurred after the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022; Others date back to 2014, when Russia annexed Ukraine’s southern Crimean peninsula and occupied parts of eastern Ukraine, prompting widespread international condemnation.

At the time, Liudmyla was working as a security engineer on a poultry farm in Novoazovsk, a city in the Donetsk region, near the Russian border.

Russian-backed armed groups took over the city, beginning several years of paramilitary control.

Liudmyla says that under the occupation, she helped care for orphans and brought food to Ukrainian forces, who gave her a Ukrainian flag with thank-you notes written on it. She believes a photo of the flag she shared with trusted friends reached Russian-backed forces: “That’s probably why they arrested me.”

She was accused of espionage, she says, and taken to Izolyatsia, a factory converted into a modern art gallery that had been taken over by Russian-backed forces. He later became widely known and feared, when numerous accounts of torture by former detainees emerged.