Ukrainian women captured by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s invading armies suffered incredible indignities and humiliation during their time as prisoners of war — including being forced to march naked through snow, regular beatings and serial rapes.
The victims — four of whom spoke to The Telegraph about the merciless torture campaign waged against them — said their hardened Russian captors subjected them to cruel degradations that included exposing themselves to the soldiers.
“They led us to the showers with bags over our heads, where we were forced to undress,” Larysa Kycherenko, a 53-year-old member of Ukraine’s National Guard, told the outlet.
“We had to walk naked in front of the men and everyone else, bent over, through freezing cold water,” she said. “Afterwards, we were forced to sing the Russian anthem while naked.”
“We returned to the cells in tears, utterly distraught, crying and in a state of hysteria,” she continued. “It was inhumane. To them, we were nothing.”
The brutality not only highlights the savageness with which the Russians treat their prisoners — actions that almost certainly violate the Geneva Conventions and constitute war crimes — but also illuminates the different threats captured women face in comparison to their male counterparts.
“If it’s hard for men, it’s even harder for women – many of the women weren’t fighters,” Kycherenko said.
Kycherenko — who was captured alongside her husband and 34-year-old son during the occupation of Mariupol in 2022 — was forced to stand for 12 hours a day, beaten and psychologically tortured, she told the outlet.
A guard once slammed her against a wall and lashed her with a metal pole — then brushed off her requests for medical treatment to close a leg wound from the attack.
“We were constantly being told we were fascists, and that if we weren’t shot by our own people during an exchange, someone else would kill us,” she said.
“The threat of death was always there.”
Russian forces have regularly been accused of torturing and mistreating prisoners and civilians alike since Putin launched his armies across the Ukrainian border in February 2022 — killing thousands of men, women and children as his soldiers raped and pillaged their way across the land.
The United Nations says Russia has also opened nearly 50 detention centers — and Ukraine’s prosecutor general says nine out of 10 POWs who return home are scarred by the invaders’ physical and psychological torture.
“I was prepared for the possibility that I might die — I had come to terms with it,” Valentyna Zubko, a 32-year-old military medic captured during the siege of Mariupol, told the outlet.
“But when I was told about captivity — that was the first time I cried.”
Zubko spent more than five months imprisoned in four different jails — and told The Telegraph her captors crammed her and 15 other people in a tiny cell with a hole in the center that served as an impromptu toilet.
She and other prisoners were regularly attacked during sickening torture games.
“We were beaten badly, and the guards seemed to enjoy it,” she said. “There was no reason – they would just beat us for fun.”
The guards also forced the women to hold agonizing postures for hours at a time and do rigorous exercises that their malnourished, weakened bodies could not possibly handle.
“We would fall to the ground and they would punish us,” she said. “We were made to march on the spot in the freezing cold for hours at a time, singing the Russian national anthem.”
Then the guards shocked them with cattle prods and power cables during repeated interrogations.
“Every day, your only task is to survive,” she added. “We were like skeletons.”
Snizhana Vasylivna Ostapenko, a 23-year-old junior sergeant with the 56th Separate Mechanized Brigade who fought in the battles for Mariupol and the Azovstal steel plant, recounted similar horrors during her five months in Olenivka prison.
She, too, was electrocuted during the lengthy interrogations, and loudspeakers blasted the Russian national anthem around the clock to ruin any chance of sleep between torture sessions.
“Sleep was impossible for days at a time,” she said. “The guards even told us, ‘We’re feeding you just enough so you don’t die.’ It was like they were keeping us alive, and nothing more. They were trying to starve us slowly.”
The guards held knives to her neck, walked her outside to show where they planned to bury her corpse and told her Ukraine had been torched and she had no home left.
Lyudmila Huseynova, 61, spent three years and 13 days in Russian captivity after they detained her in 2019 for showing a photo of a resistance flag to people she thought were friends, The Telegraph said.
The guards sexually assaulted her during that time, and raped several fellow female prisoners.
“They turned me to face the wall and undressed me,” she said. “Someone touched me, and then there were a lot of hands. And they commented, they laughed, they pinched, they felt everywhere with their hands.”
To torture her, guards forced her to stand for over 12 hours a day.
“One time I just couldn’t stand it, my back hurt so much,” she said. “I thought, ‘Well, what will happen if I climb up into bed for 10 to 15 minutes?’”
That’s when the Russian guards charged in and screamed at her that she had to get up.
“But I couldn’t quickly because I was undressed,” she said.
“He grabbed me by the leg and threw me from the top bunk bed onto the concrete floor. I fell, but they continued to kick me. Later I took off my clothes and saw that my body was black.”
Her captors also brought younger girls to the soldiers’ dormitory to be raped, Huseynova said.
The soldiers would lie to their victims and promise that afterward the women would get food or see their children.
“When they returned, they cried,” she said. “I heard terrible screams.”
“I could hear people beating and people were screaming. It was such a horror.”
