Inside Kremlin’s hidden torture camp for Ukrainians in Belarus

The Russian military converted a state-owned enterprise in Belarus into a “filtration” camp, where Ukrainian soldiers and civilians—including minors—were tortured, an investigation by the Ukrainian bureau of Radio Liberty has revealed.

The investigative project has pinpointed a state-owned site in the city of Naroulia, Gomel Oblast, in southeastern Belarus. The findings reveal that the site served as both a filtration facility and a torture chamber for Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilians seized by Russian troops during the occupation of Kyiv Oblast in the spring of 2022.

Since the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Belarus has played a complex role in the war, acting as a key ally to Russia in various aspects.

In February 2022, Russian troops used Belarus as a launchpad for attacks on Ukraine, including an attempted assault on Kyiv. Despite denying Belarusian troop involvement, President Lukashenko allowed Russian forces to stage drills on Belarusian soil before the invasion and continued to back Moscow with crucial logistical support throughout the war.

In addition to providing crucial support for the invasion, Minsk stationed Belarusian troops near the border as a show of force seeking to restrain Ukrainian forces. In May 2023, Lukashenko also greenlit the deployment of Russian tactical nuclear weapons on Belarusian soil, a move seeking to warn the West from aiding Ukraine’s defense by upping the nuclear stakes.

Despite being elbow-deep in Russian war crimes, Belarus remains unclassified as an aggressor under international law and still keeps the diplomatic door with Kyiv open, which Ukraine leverages to facilitate POW swaps and repatriation of its deportees from Russia.

However, the discovery of the filtration camp right on the border could shift the balance and unravel the already precarious status quo.

The torture chamber at Chornobyl’s door

After the full-scale invasion broke out, Ukrainian journalists and human rights activists reported receiving testimonies about a “filtration” camp in Narovlya, where the Russian troops allegedly held both military and civilians.

The facility’s existence was first confirmed by a joint investigation from the Schemes project in collaboration with the Belarusian Investigation Center (BIC), Radio Free Europe, The Reckoning Project, and the Cyberpartisans hacker group, digging into satellite imagery, propaganda videos, detainee testimonies, and hacked data.

The evidence confirmed the camp’s location in Naroulia, a town 25 km (16 miles) from the Ukrainian border and nearly 70 km (43.5 miles) from the Chornobyl nuclear power plant – part of the exclusion zone Russian forces deep swept through on their initial push towards Kyiv in February 2022.

The site’s position near the uninhabited no-go area allowed Russian forces to transfer Ukrainian civilians across borders without drawing international scrutiny. The investigative team suggests that hundreds may have passed through before it was abandoned in mid-2022, shortly after Russian troops pulled out of northern Ukraine.

The report reveals that the filtration point was set up in a former industrial complex owned by a Belarusian state enterprise and overseen by Lukashenko’s Council of Ministers, indicating approval from Minsk.

Industrial complex turned filtration camp

According to the findings, the facility was repurposed for filtration – an unregulated process to assess the local population’s loyalty to the occupying regime, a tactic Russian troops widely enforce across occupied territories of Ukraine.

Numerous reports highlight that the filtration process often includes arbitrary detention, torture, and enforced disappearances, drawing widespread condemnation from the UN, Amnesty International, as well as the US and Canadian governments.

Ukrainian human rights advocates describe the Naroulia camp as one of the harshest in its treatment of prisoners, with detainees facing interrogations, physical beatings, and systematic humiliation.

The camp’s operations involved the arbitrary detention and torture of Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) and civilians, including minors. Detainees were also featured in propaganda videos aired on Russian state TV and used as tools in psychological warfare.

Satellite imagery and testimonies from former detainees reveal that the facility was set up on the grounds of the Pripyatsky Alliance state enterprise on Komsomolskaya Street.

“It was like an abandoned collective farm building,” said Vladislav Yahodynsky, a former civilian detainee who was taken there as a minor.

Military prisoner Bohdan Lysenko, who was captured in March 2022, described the detention center as “agricultural territory – a former collective farm or tractor base.”

“When they carried me out on a stretcher, I saw many tractors there. The buildings where we were held were large concrete rooms used for storage,” he said.

The investigation revealed that Russian forces used multiple Belarusian state facilities in Naroulia, including the parking lot at Naroulia State College, which housed a field hospital, and the premises of Bus Park No. 2, part of the state-owned transport enterprise, where they stationed their military equipment.

Behind Russia’s “hostage diplomacy” strategy

According to Iryna Badanova, an expert from the Ukrainian Armed Forces General Staff’s prisoner release coordination group, “the worst abuse was inflicted on civilian hostages” at the camp.

The investigative group behind the camp’s discovery notes that Narovlya was primarily used to detain civilians captured during the Russian occupation of Kyiv Oblast.

Despite international humanitarian law prohibiting the taking of civilians hostage, Russian troops have systematically abducted and tortured those suspected of loyalty to Ukraine, viewing them as threats to the occupation regime.

Filtration primarily targets government officials, pro-Ukrainian volunteers, activists, journalists, and others expressing pro-Ukrainian views, often resulting in forced disappearances or executions.

Additionally, Russia exploits civilian hostage-taking as part of its extensive “hostage diplomacy,” leveraging captives to negotiate favorable terms or exert pressure on Kyiv and its allies. Human rights activists note that filtration camps are key to the Kremlin’s broader war crime system, facilitating the deportation of Ukrainian civilians to Russia and stifling local resistance.

Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Andrii Kostin claims authorities have uncovered over 160 sites the Kremlin uses for illegal detention and torture of Ukrainian hostages.

Inside the Naroulia filtration camp

Former detainees testify to the harsh conditions at the filtration camp, including malnutrition, poor sanitation, lack of medical care, beatings, torture, and degrading treatment, such as being stripped naked during the filtration process.

“Civilians were beaten there. I mean, we heard constant screaming,” said Bohdan Lysenko, a Ukrainian soldier who was taken to Naroulya after his capture in March 2022.

Russian troops also held minors at the facility, including the Yahodynsky brothers from Orane village in Kyiv Oblast, located about 45 kilometers (28 miles) from the Belarusian border.

According to their mother, Larysa Yahodynska, Russian soldiers captured her sons during the occupation of the northern Kyiv Oblast in March 2022. The brothers were detained while crossing the Russian checkpoint and forced into an armored personnel carrier at gunpoint.

“They called us saboteurs and took us away. They brought us to Chornobyl, where they beat us. The same day, they transported us to Naroulia in Belarus,” one of them recalls.

The younger son, Vladyslav, was underage when he was taken away. He recalls being severely beaten at the camp and reports that his older brother sustained broken ribs from a beating with a baseball bat.

However, the Yahodynsky brothers’ case is neither unique in scale nor severity. Investigators estimate that hundreds of Ukrainian civilians were taken to Naroulia by Russian forces.

The Kremlin’s partner in crime

Legal experts at The Reckoning Project, which probes Russian war crimes in Ukraine, stress that forced civilian transfers from occupied areas breach Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. International law also prohibits holding captured combatants in shared facilities with civilians.

Kateryna Rashevska, a lawyer at the Regional Center for Human Rights, points out that the systematic nature and scale of Russia’s deportations may warrant reclassification.

“Deportation is a war crime, but considering the scale and systematic nature, if it becomes policy, it can also be considered a crime against humanity,” Rashevska stresses.

Although Lukashenko dismisses Belarus’s involvement in Russia’s war crimes, lawyers assert that aiding the Kremlin with illegal detentions and deportations makes Minsk complicit in international crimes.

Yulia Polekhina, a lawyer with the Sich Human Rights Group, agrees that Belarus should held accountable for the Narovlya case, stating that filtration camps like these can’t operate without state approval.

“When people are beaten, tortured, and denied medical care – this is a war crime. And this cannot happen without the authorities’ consent,” Polekhina said.

She claims that the crime takes on a whole new level of severity, considering that minors were also detained at the facility.

“Is Lukashenko responsible for this? I am sure it is,” Polekhina added.

Ukrainian authorities documented at least 2,219 instances of deporting Ukrainian children to Belarus. According to the Ukrainian human rights center ZMINA, the Lukashenko government helped set up at least 18 camps for deported Ukrainian minors, often passing off deportations and re-education as humanitarian efforts run by state-controlled NGOs.

Calculated torture advances Russian agenda, lawyers say

The Naroulia case is just one piece of the puzzle in the systematic torture of Ukrainian civilians by Russian authorities, playing out across occupied territories and detention sites in Russia.

According to Prosecutor General Kostin, more than 3,800 civilian captives and 2,200 Ukrainian prisoners of war have been officially documented as victims of torture and inhumane treatment. However, Kostin states that the actual scale of torture may far exceed these figures.

“Up to 90% of all returned POWs stated they have been subject to torture in Russian prisons…This is a stark violation of the third Geneva Convention, of which Moscow is a signatory,” Kostin says.

Danielle Bell, who heads the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, confirms these findings:

It is the worst I have seen in my 20-year career, visiting prisoners on behalf of the UN. Torture is widespread and systematic. 95% of Ukrainian prisoners of war have been tortured, and this constitutes a war crime,” the UN representative says.

Ukrainian POWs have reported enduring severe beatings, electric shocks, sleep deprivation, and dog attacks. Many have also suffered mock executions and death threats while being subjected to starvation and denied medical care and basic necessities.

Erik Møse, chair of the Ukraine Inquiry Commission, highlights the emergence of systematic sexual violence against male detainees, adding to the systematic use of rape as a weapon of war against women in Russian-occupied territories.

“Almost every single one of the Ukrainian POWs we interviewed described how Russian servicepersons or officials tortured them during their captivity, using repeated beatings, electric shocks, threats of execution, prolonged stress positions, and mock execution. Over half of them were subjected to sexual violence,” Bell adds.

International humanitarian and human rights law strictly prohibits torture and all forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment – a ban that applies in all circumstances, including armed conflict.

The Geneva Conventions define torture as a “grave breach,” explicitly banning all forms of physical or mental torture or coercion against protected persons, including civilians and prisoners of war.

Andrii Yusov, a Ukrainian Defense Intelligence official, reveals that Russia operates a systematic torture program against prisoners of war, including deliberately training torture “specialists.”

“In most cases, this wasn’t about using force to extract information. It was deliberate torture designed to break a person’s will, destroy their identity, humiliate their dignity, and force them to abandon everything they value—or to break those around them,” Yusov says.

Read also:

• ICC team investigates Russian torture chambers in Kharkiv Oblast
• Starvation, beatings, nails ripped out: Russia systematically tortures Ukrainian POWs till death
• UN report: Russian torture of Ukrainian POWs “widespread and systematic”