When the Ukrainians lost control of a position near the town of Pokrovsk earlier this year, a soldier known only as Vladyslav was taken prisoner along with seven others. What happened next was a display of the most calculated savagery. Their Russian captors, taking each man in turn, sliced off their genitals, gouged out their eyes and cut off their ears, noses and lips.

We know this because, when it came to Vladyslav, 33, they contented themselves with giving him a beating, tying him up, slitting his throat and throwing him into a pit with his mutilated comrades. While all the others subsequently died, Vladyslav found a shard of glass from a broken bottle and used it to saw through the ropes binding his wrists.

Then he clawed his way out of his grave and, with a rag pressed to the wound in his throat, dragged himself through the fields and forests of no man’s land towards Ukrainian lines.

Despite being unable to eat and barely able to swallow water, he covered five miles at the rate of one excruciating mile a day.

By the time the National Guardsman was found by his rescuers, he was a pathetic figure: his neck encrusted with blood, his body coated in mud. His survival, doctors said later, was a miracle.

But the truth is that Vladyslav’s story is nothing new.

Nearly 95 per cent of released Ukrainian prisoners of war have told UN investigators they were tortured or otherwise ill-treated in Russian custody, with many accounts including tales of beatings, electric shocks, mock executions and, perhaps most horrifyingly, sexual violence.

According to a report from the UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, published in March 2023, male PoWs were, in some cases, penetrated with objects such as batons during interrogations — acts designed to inflict maximum pain and humiliation.

The UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) documented similar atrocities in its November 2022 report, noting cases of rape, threats of gang rape and sexualised beatings, often in front of other captives to terrorise them.

Freed prisoners describe a machinery of degradation designed to break body and spirit. In Kherson, PoWs were stripped on arrival, beaten with hammers, wired with electrodes and forced to endure torture that the guards revelled in. They gave their various ‘techniques’ nicknames. ‘Calling Biden’ meant electric shocks through the anus. ‘Calling Zelensky’ was shocks through the penis or testicles.

This extraordinary level of barbarity can be attributed, at least in part, to the way Russian soldiers are brutalised from the moment they arrive at their barracks for the first time.

This practice dates back to Tsarist times, when an institutionalised system of bullying called ‘Dedovshchina’, which translates roughly as the ‘rule of the grandfathers’, was introduced.

Fresh recruits would be set about with whips; and when they, in turn, achieved seniority, the abused became the abusers, meting out just as savage treatment on new arrivals. This programme of desensitisation was supplemented by the evolution of a culture in which life was worthless.

In the Second World War, when the meat-grinder tactics that have become notorious in the Ukraine war were pioneered, commanders from Stalin down had a disregard for the lives of their own men.

In such a context, the enemy became less than human. Nowhere was this phenomenon more baldly illustrated than when the Red Army swept through eastern Germany at the end of the war.

One female Soviet war correspondent wrote later: ‘The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to 80, It was an army of rapists.’

The full horror of the Russians’ treatment of captives in the current conflict came to global attention in July 2022, five months after Moscow launched its invasion, when a horrifying video surfaced online. It shows a short, stocky man wearing an incongruous wide-brimmed, sequinned hat and blue surgical gloves brandishing the severed genitals of a Ukrainian prisoner at the camera, beaming with pride as he does so.

His partners in this hideous crime can be heard whooping and cheering in the background.

On the floor lies the wretched victim, a Ukrainian prisoner of war who they have just beaten into unconsciousness.

The video shows that after stamping on him repeatedly, the Russians had bound and gagged him before the ringleader knelt, box-cutter in hand, and sliced through the soldier’s trousers.

A follow-up clip shows the same prisoner, barely conscious, his mouth taped shut. His captors toss his mutilated organs at his face, before dragging him to a ditch and shooting him in the head.

The investigative journalism group Bellingcat geolocated the atrocity to Pryvillia sanatorium in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine and identified the butcher as Ochur-Suge Mongush, a fighter from the southern Siberian republic of Tuva who was serving in the Chechen Akhmat unit.

International reaction to the video was immediate and furious. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell branded the act a ‘heinous atrocity’. Amnesty International called it proof of Russia’s ‘complete disregard for human life and dignity’. And Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman petitioned international courts.

The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission says the images – of a bound, mutilated man shot like an animal – constitute a war crime in its starkest form.

The gruesomeness at Pryvillia sanatorium is not unique: the savagery continues to this day.

At notorious Pre-Trial Detention Facility No. 2 in the port city of Taganrog in south-west Russia, inmates were kicked around like footballs. Indeed, that is the name the guards gave to this activity.

Survivors like sailor Oleksii Sivak and Illia Illiashenko, who was captured after the siege of Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol in May 2022, recall days filled with cries from neighbouring cells, men crawling away from mock executions, women forced into humiliating inspections.

The victims ‘screamed like animals’, they said, and were starved until their skin shrank almost to bone. The common thread from the freed captives’ accounts is a systematic regime of cruelty: a conveyor belt of beatings, electrocution, starvation and forced confessions – all run with cold, bureaucratic precision behind barbed wire and iron doors.

This is borne out by the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission. In June, it documented at least 35 executions of captured Ukrainian soldiers from December 1, 2024, to May 31, 2025.

Last month Ukraine’s prosecutor general said it had documented the execution during captivity of at least 273 Ukrainian PoWs.

Even those who escape death get a life sentence. Take the case of Roman, 56, who was captured at Azovstal. Guards threw a rope over a branch, tied the noose round his neck and hoisted him in the air. His body thrashed until his vision went black. When he collapsed into unconsciousness, they doused him with water, revived him and repeated the process.

Later, they marched him into a room where a basin of water lay on the floor. They stripped him to the waist and made him stand in it, before attaching wires to his body.

Then the electric shocks began. ‘It felt like my body was burning from the inside,’ he later told reporters. Every time he fainted, they shocked him awake again.

The pain was all-encompassing: his muscles locked, his jaws clenched, his eyes rolled back. And then they would begin again.

His ordeal only ended when he was released as part of a prisoner swap in December of last year but the memories of that dark time will stay with him for ever.

In one detention facility in Russian-occupied territory, a captured Ukrainian soldier was dragged into an interrogation room, stripped naked and pinned to the floor. His hands were bound so tightly behind his back, the ropes cut into his skin. The men questioning him laughed as they beat him, hammering his groin.

Then one of them took an electric baton and forced it inside him, switching on the current while the others jeered.

The prisoner later told UN investigators that the pain was so intense he lost consciousness, waking only to find himself still tied-up naked, but now smeared in blood and filth. The abuse was repeated in front of other captives, part of a ritual of degradation designed to break them all.

The screams of men being raped or electrocuted in nearby rooms were, he said, a nightly soundtrack. The goal was not just to torture but to terrify, too.

Investigators have concluded that these patterns of torture, ill-treatment and execution constitute crimes against humanity.

And the Russians are not even content with the most savage forms of torture and murder. They want to leave their mark on their victims – often literally.

In February 2024, after being wounded on the battlefield, Andriy Pereverzev was taken prisoner. He begged the Russians to kill him but they refused, telling him that they received a bounty for every Ukrainian PoW they took back to their own lines.

He was taken to a prison hospital and subjected to months of ‘medical’ procedures. But his captors there did not only torture him. They turned him into a canvas.

After one operation, the only one for which he was given any anaesthetic, he woke to discover that under his bandages his Russian surgeon had used a hot scalpel to carve, in Cyrillic letters, the words ‘Slava Russia’ (‘Glory to Russia’), a bastardisation of the Ukrainian battle cry ‘Slava Ukraine’.

To the right, below his navel, was carved a ‘Z’, the symbol of support for the Russian invasion, daubed on most of their military vehicles.

After eleven months in captivity, Pereverzev was freed but the mental and physical scars of his torture stay with him. ‘I have a thirst for revenge,’ he now says.

The war is visible in every ruined apartment block and scorched field. But there is another, hidden battle – fought in prison cells, barracks and basements.

It is the site of slit throats, hangings, branding, rape threats, electrocution, castration and murder. This is the Putin way of war.

The Russians’ campaign of torture is so programmatic and pervasive that it has become another frontline of the war itself.

But even more than that, it is a morality tale of what happens when a brutal regime led by a genocidal dictator is appeased by the world for years until an entire country becomes a canvas on to which he can paint his bloody, imperial fantasies in the deepest red.