The torture dungeon at Igor Girkin’s Slovyansk headquarters – 1 year later. #FreeSavchenko

By Slavgorod.com.ua
07.06.2015
Translated and edited by Voices of Ukraine

A year later, [former] prisoners of the Slovyansk SBU told Donbas schoolchildren about the tortures they suffered in the dungeons of Girkin’s headquarters. [Editor’s note: SBU is the Security Service of Ukraine building in Slovyansk, taken over by Russian-backed insurgents on April 12, 2014 led by Russian veteran Igor Girkin before it was liberated by Ukrainian troops on July 5, 2014]

On July 5, on the [1-year] anniversary of the liberation of Slovyansk, one of the first events in the town was a tour of the dungeons in the SBU building, where a year ago a large number of prisoners were held. Those who managed to get out alive and unharmed, told the children and adults from nine Donbas cities about the events of that summer.

The tour was supported by the volunteers of the Ukrainian youth public organization Student Brotherhood.

Among the [former] prisoners – were citizens of Slovyansk, Donetsk, Konstantinovka, Luhansk. One of them – a resident of Konstantinovka, Yaroslav Malanchuk, who was detained within the walls of the Slovyansk SBU for 67 days, said that by some cosmic irony, he served in a Baltic division together with Igor Girkin [under the Soviets]. According to Yaroslav, on the night of the 4–5th of July, a mortar located in the center of the city worked [fired] until 3 am, although the basement door was opened around midnight.

A resident of Slovyansk, Viktor Butko described his two-day imprisonment. According to Viktor, he was detained after he began telling local residents that the shelling in the vicinity of the printing house could not technically have been carried out by the Ukrainian army. According to Viktor, he ended up in the hands of the insurgents after a denunciation by the so-called “Pavlik Morozov” [who turned his father in to the Soviet authorities].

Tourists also saw the room in which the deputy of the Horlivka City Council, Volodymyr Rybak, was allegedly killed. After the liberation of the city, his cross was found in this room.

Russian MREs [Meals, Ready to Eat], propaganda posters, boxes of ammunition, destroyed equipment, lists of banned media, and other items were found in the building.

As retold by the former prisoners, some of the patriots captured by the insurgents made notches on the walls, so as not to lose the number of days that they spent in the “torture chambers.”