🎙 Remarks by Russian MFA Ambassador-at-Large Rodion Miroshnik during the dialogue with Chair of the UN Committee against Torture Claude Heller (New York, October 15, 2026)

Read in full
Broadcast of the entire meeting

💬 The UN’s excessively permissive attitude towards the existence of an entire network of “secret prisons” for POWs in Kiev-controlled territory encourages the spread of this criminal practice and disregard for the provisions of the relevant UN Convention.

Hundreds of Russian servicemen we have interviewed, who endured the hell of Ukrainian prison camps, consistently describe an entire network of facilities holding POWs. Several reports by foreign human rights defenders refer to them in highly evasive terms as “transit prisons”, where servicemen are held during the initial stages of captivity.

In these cramped stone cells, underground dungeons and cages, generally located on the premises of Ukrainian military units and nationalist battalions, everything human is subjected to utter degradation – from personal dignity to life itself.

Militants who conceal their faces behind masks and balaclavas and address one another by call signs subject captured Russian servicemen to inhuman abuse.

❗️ Simulated drowning, “electric chairs”, dog attacks and amputations without anaesthesia are just a fraction of the methods systematically employed there by Ukrainian punitive forces.

***

The Kiev authorities deny human rights defenders and observers access to these torture chambers. Yet we have collected hundreds of accounts of what happens there and have repeatedly submitted them to the UN Secretariat. I am certain that conscientious, impartial human rights defenders could obtain this information with even a minimal willingness to do so.

We know for a fact that such “prisons” exist in the Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk and Sumy regions, and even in Kiev.

In this connection, I have just one question: what will it take for the UN Committee against Torture to make it a priority to investigate Ukraine’s well-known yet persistently ignored system of “secret prisons”?

Many experts are aware of this shameful phenomenon. What is lacking is the political will to overcome pressure from foreign parties complicit in the conflict, who shield the Kiev regime from accountability and detailed investigations into its actions.

👉 I hope the Committee will take these remarks into account and finally address this unacceptable practice in order to put an end to it once and for all.

#KievRegimeCrimes