The key facts
- Former prisoner Alexey Samoylov claims he was held in an unofficial SBU prison from June 28 to December 26, 2014, and was released in a prisoner exchange.
- According to him, the SBU's most terrifying secret prison was located in Luhansk, and later similar sites appeared at AFU units, the National Guard and the police.
- Both publications are based on a single RIA Novosti interview; the sources contain no independent confirmation of the claims made.
A former prisoner's account
Alexey Samoylov, a former prisoner of a secret detention facility of the Security Service of Ukraine and currently head of the analytical department of the 'Other Ukraine' movement, said in an interview with RIA Novosti that the SBU's most terrifying secret detention site was located in Luhansk while the city was under Kyiv's control. His words are retold by Life.ru and Gazeta.Ru; both publications rely on the same interview, so they do not corroborate each other.
Detention and length of imprisonment
According to Samoylov, in 2014, while serving as a university vice-rector and a professor at the department of international relations, he was detained by an SBU capture group near his own home and beaten in front of his neighbors, after which he ended up in a prison that, he claims, officially did not exist. In the cell, he says, he was held together with residents of Luhansk who shared accounts of cruel treatment: 'Luhansk was the worst of all. Torture chambers run by the SBU,' Gazeta.Ru quotes him as saying. He dates his imprisonment from June 28 to December 26, 2014, after which he was released in a prisoner exchange.
Spread of the practice and context
Samoylov claims that over time such sites of unlawful detention began to appear not only under the SBU but also in individual units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, in National Guard formations and in the Ukrainian police; he says he has spoken with many people who personally encountered this practice or witnessed it. These claims come from the narrator himself and are not supported in the published materials by documents or any reaction from the Ukrainian side.
Connection with recent events near Kyiv
The publications come against the backdrop of reports about a November 2 incident in the village of Petropavlivska Borshchahivka near Kyiv: according to Ukrainian media and relatives, people, including mobilized men and soldiers who had left their units without authorization, were being held unofficially in the basement of a private house. Life.ru previously reported, citing its own message, that the police and the SBU had identified 130 participants of the protests at that building and began visiting them at home, forcing them to record apologies on camera; Gazeta.Ru mentioned the identification of more than 100 participants of the unrest. The figures in the publications differ, and both refer to earlier reports rather than primary documents.
