A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize has called for immediate action after a report claimed Russia is weaponising doctors and medics to torture Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war.
Oleksandra Matviichuk leads the Center for Civil Liberties, the human rights organisation which received the prize in 2022 alongside Russian non-profit Memorial and Belarusian campaigner Ales Bialiatski.
The centre is among a group of Ukrainian charities and institutions sounding the alarm over allegations of international law and medical ethics by Russia.
Medics are alleged to have denied badly needed care, tortured prisoners with tasers – and even branded patients with pro-Russia messages.
Matviichuk told : ‘We want to share this information to put pressure on Russia in order to save lives, because people are dying. People are dying.
‘Their conditions are inhuman and the treatment is beyond human imagination.’
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She highlighted the case of a man who told her he saw medics only once while incarcerated, after he lost consciousness while being tortured.
Matviichuk, a human rights lawyer, said: ‘The Russian medics were invited to give an injection and to return him to consciousness, to provide the opportunity to continue the torture process.’
In another case, she spoke of a Ukrainian soldier who woke from an operation to find the words ‘Glory to Russia’ had been written in scars on his skin with a surgical tool.
She said: ‘Now this person, after returning to Ukraine as a result of prisoner exchange, is going through the process of removing this slogan from his body.
‘It’s a very painful and long-lasting process.’
Such incidents are systemic rather than isolated, she said, pointing to testimonies collected over 12 years since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014.
Matviichuk explained: ‘We interviewed people who returned from the prisons, but we also interviewed people who get information from people who are close to them – their relatives, their families, who are still under occupation.
‘We analyse open data with other verifications, draw a lot of information about different signs of captivity in video, in social networks.
‘And Russians are very brutal. They are not even hiding their crimes.’
The report, titled Anatomy of Torture, was written by four experts based at the Center for Civil Liberties and supported by the UK Government.
Testimonies include several describing an individual based in the Russian Republic of Mordovia dubbed ‘Doctor Evil’.
One person quoted in the report described a visit from the doctor: ‘The cell opens, and he hits the person addressing him and the person on duty in the cell.
‘And he would start talking like this: “Patient, what’s wrong with you? Patient, come here, give me your hand.”
‘Your eyes are closed, your head is tilted down, and you can’t see anything. You give him your hand, and he hits you in the hand with a taser. First, he hits you with a taser, and then he gives you a pill.’
Another person said the so-called Doctor Evil participated in torture and ‘ensured the person stayed alive’.
The doctor in question was identified as Ilya Sorokin by Ukrainian human rights group KHPG.
He was charged in absentia by the Security Service of Ukraine (SSU) in December last year, but Matviichuk said there is ‘no possibility to physically arrest him because he is in Russia’.
The lawyer said ‘several submissions’ had been sent to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and she called on the body to ‘open the case based on these crimes against humanity’.
She added: ‘What must be done is provide the full access of International Committee of Red Cross to all illegally detained civilians and prisoners of the war, and to create a special medics commission to be sent to Russia to work to get access to people.’
Matviichuk also urged professional medics in other countries to react to the practice, arguing such a mobilisation can have a ‘chilling effect’ on Russian behaviour as some exchanges and cooperation still exist.
Last week, the Center for Civil Liberties led an open appeal to the World Health Organisation alongside a number of other NGOs, institutions and groups, calling for an intervention.
The letter says the WHO has ‘unique expertise and international capacity to draw attention to violations of the right to health, uphold international standards of medical care, and help ensure that the principles of healthcare and medical ethics remain in force even in situations of armed conflict’.
When approached by , the WHO declined to comment.
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