The primary time the Russian troopers caught him, they tossed him certain and blindfolded right into a trench coated with picket boards for days on finish.
Then they beat him, again and again: legs, arms, a hammer to the knees, all accompanied by livid diatribes towards Ukraine.
Earlier than they let him go, they took away his passport and Ukrainian navy ID — all he needed to show his existence — and made positive he knew precisely how nugatory his life was.
“Nobody wants you,” the commander taunted.
“We will shoot you any time, bury you a half-metre underground and that’s it.”
The brutal encounter on the finish of March was simply the beginning.
Andriy Kotsar could be captured and tortured twice extra by Russian forces in Izium, and the ache could be even worse.
Russian torture in Izium was arbitrary, widespread and completely routine for each civilians and troopers all through the town, an Related Press investigation has discovered.
Whereas torture was additionally evident in Bucha, that devastated Kyiv suburb was solely occupied for a month.
Izium served as a hub for Russian troopers for almost seven months, throughout which they established torture websites in all places.
Primarily based on accounts of survivors and police, AP journalists positioned 10 torture websites within the city and gained entry to 5 of them.
They included a deep sunless pit in a residential compound with dates carved within the brick wall, a clammy underground jail that reeked of urine and rotting meals, a medical clinic, a police station and a kindergarten.
The AP spoke to fifteen survivors of Russian torture within the Kharkiv area, in addition to two households whose family members disappeared into Russian palms.
Two of the lads had been taken repeatedly and abused.
One battered, unconscious Ukrainian soldier was exhibited to his spouse to drive her to offer info she merely did not have.
The AP additionally confirmed eight males had been killed underneath torture in Russian custody, in line with survivors and households.
All however one had been civilians.
At a mass grave website created by the Russians and found within the woods of Izium, no less than 30 of the 447 our bodies not too long ago excavated bore seen marks of torture — certain palms, shut gunshot wounds, knife wounds and damaged limbs, in line with the Kharkiv regional prosecutor’s workplace.
These accidents corresponded to the descriptions of the ache inflicted upon the survivors.
AP journalists additionally noticed our bodies with certain wrists on the mass grave.
Amid the bushes had been a whole lot of easy picket crosses, most marked solely with numbers.
One stated it contained the our bodies of 17 Ukrainian troopers.
At the very least two extra mass graves have been discovered within the city, all closely mined, authorities stated.
A doctor who handled a whole lot of Izium’s injured throughout the Russian occupation stated folks repeatedly arrived at his emergency room with accidents according to torture, together with gunshots to their palms and ft, damaged bones and extreme bruising, and burns.
None would clarify their wounds, he stated.
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“Even when folks got here to the hospital, silence was the norm,” Dr Yuriy Kuznetsov stated.
He added that one soldier got here in for therapy for hand accidents, clearly from being cuffed, however the man refused to say what occurred.
Males with hyperlinks to Ukrainian forces had been singled out repeatedly for torture, however any grownup man risked getting caught up.
Matilda Bogner, the top of the UN human rights mission in Ukraine, instructed the AP that they had documented “widespread practices of torture or ill-treatment of civilian detainees” by Russian forces and associates.
Torture of troopers was additionally systemic, she stated.
Torture in any type throughout an armed battle is a warfare crime underneath the Geneva Conventions, whether or not of prisoners of warfare or civilians.
“It serves three functions,” Rachel Denber of Human Rights Watch stated.
“Torture got here with questions to coerce info, however additionally it is to punish and to sow concern. It's to ship a chilling message to everybody else.”
No secure haven
AP journalists discovered Kotsar, 26, hiding in a monastery in Izium, his blond hair tied again neatly within the Orthodox trend and his beard curling beneath his chin.
He had no approach to safely contact his family members, who thought he was useless.
Again in March, after his first spherical of torture, Kotsar fled to the gold-domed Pishchanskyi church.
Russian troopers had been in all places, and nowhere in Izium was secure.
Hiding amid the icons, Kotsar listened to the rumble of Russian armoured automobiles exterior and contemplated suicide.
He had been a soldier for just below a month and had no thought if anybody in his little unit had survived the Russian onslaught.
When he emerged from the church a couple of days later, a Russian patrol caught him.
They saved him every week.
His captors’ thought of a joke was to shave his legs with a knife, after which debate aloud whether or not to slice off the limb fully.
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“They took, I don’t know what precisely, some iron, perhaps glass rods, and burned the pores and skin little by little,” he stated.
He knew nothing that might assist them.
So that they set him free once more, and once more he sought refuge with the monks.
He had nowhere else to go.
By then, the church and monastery compound had turn into a shelter for round 100 folks, together with 40 kids.
Kotsar took up a model of the monastic life, residing with the black-robed brothers, serving to them take care of the refugees and spending his free hours standing earlier than the gilt icons in contemplation.
Within the meantime, Izium was reworking right into a Russian logistical hub.
The city was swarming with troops, and its electrical energy, fuel, water and telephone networks had been severed.
Izium was successfully lower off from the remainder of Ukraine.
Screams within the evening
It was additionally within the spring that the Russians first sought out Mykola Mosyakyn, driving down the rutted filth roads till they reached the Ukrainian soldier’s fenced cottage.
Mosyakyn, 38, had enlisted after the warfare started, although not in the identical unit as Kotsar.
They tossed him right into a pit with standing water, handcuffed him and hung him by the restraints till his pores and skin went numb.
They waited in useless for him to speak, and tried once more.
“They beat me with sticks. They hit me with their palms, they kicked me, they put out cigarettes on me, they pressed matches on me,” he recounted.
“They stated, ‘Dance,’ however I didn't dance. So that they shot my ft."
After three days they dropped him close to the hospital with the command: “Inform them you had an accident.”
At the very least two different males from Mosyakyn’s neighbourhood, a father and son who're each civilians, had been taken on the similar time.
The daddy speaks about his two weeks within the basement cell in a whisper, staring on the floor.
His grownup son refuses to discuss it in any respect.
That household, together with one other man who was additionally tortured within the basement cell on Izium’s east financial institution, spoke on situation of anonymity.
They're terrified the Russians will return.
Mosyakyn was captured once more by a special Russian unit just some days later.
This time, he discovered himself in Faculty No. 2, topic to routine beatings together with different Ukrainians.
AP journalists discovered a discarded Ukrainian soldier’s jacket in the identical blue cell he described intimately.
The varsity additionally served as a base and area hospital for Russian troopers, and no less than two Ukrainian civilians held there died.
However the troopers once more freed Mosyakyn.
To today, he doesn’t know why.
Nor does he perceive why they’d launch him simply to recapture him a couple of days later and haul him to a crowded storage of a medical clinic close to the railroad tracks.
Greater than a dozen different Ukrainians had been jailed with him, troopers and civilians.
Two garages had been for males, one for girls and a much bigger one — the one one with a window — for Russian troopers.
Girls had been held within the storage closest to the troopers’ quarters.
Their screams got here at evening, in line with Mosyakyn and Kotsar, who had been each held on the clinic at totally different occasions.
Ukrainian intelligence officers stated the ladies had been raped repeatedly.
For the lads, Room 6 was for electrocution.
Room 9 was for waterboarding, Mosyakyn stated.
He described how they coated his face with a fabric bag and poured water from a kettle onto him to imitate the feeling of drowning.
Additionally they attached his toes to electrical energy and shocked him with electrodes on his ears.
It was right here that Mosyakyn watched Russian troopers drag out the lifeless our bodies of two civilians they’d tortured to demise, each from Izium’s Gonkharovka neighbourhood.
Kotsar was taken to the clinic in July and obtained a barely totally different therapy, involving a Soviet-era fuel masks and electrodes on his legs.
AP journalists additionally discovered fuel masks at two colleges.
By the point Kotsar arrived, folks had already been there for 12 to 16 days.
They instructed him legs and arms had been damaged, and folks had been taken out to be shot.
He vowed that if he survived, he would by no means enable himself to be captured once more.
They launched him after a few weeks.
He craved acquainted faces and individuals who meant him no hurt. He returned to the monks.
“After I got here out, the whole lot was inexperienced. It was very, very unusual, as a result of there had been completely no color,” he stated.
“Every little thing was fantastic, so vivid.”
Shallow grave
In mid-August, the our bodies of three males had been present in a shallow forested pit in town’s outskirts.
Ivan Shabelnyk left residence with a pal on March 23 to gather pine cones so the household might mild the samovar and have tea.
They by no means got here again.
One other man taken with them reluctantly instructed Shabelnyk’s household concerning the torture they’d all endured collectively, first within the basement of a close-by home after which in Faculty No. 2.
Then he left city.
Their our bodies had been present in mid-August, within the final days of the occupation, by a person scavenging for firewood.
He adopted the scent of demise to a shallow grave within the forest.
Shabelnyk’s palms had been shot, his ribs damaged, his face unrecognisable.
They recognized him by the jacket he wore, from the native grain manufacturing unit the place he labored.
His grieving mom confirmed the AP a photograph.
“He saved this picture with him, of us collectively when he was a small boy,” Ludmila Shabelnyk, in tears, stated.
“Why did they destroy folks like him? I don’t perceive. Why has this occurred to our nation?”
His sister, Olha Zaparozhchenko, walked with journalists via the cemetery and checked out his grave.
“They tortured civilians at will, like bullies,” she stated.
“I've just one phrase: genocide.”
The Kharkiv area’s chief prosecutor, Oleksandr Filchakov, instructed the AP it was too quickly to find out how many individuals had been tortured in Izium, however stated it simply numbered into the handfuls.
“Daily, many individuals name us with info, individuals who had been within the occupied territories,” he stated.
“Daily, kin come to us and say their pals, their household, had been tortured by Russian troopers.”
Lacking no extra
After his closing escape, Kotsar hid within the monastery for greater than a month.
With out paperwork and a telephone connection to show his identification, he was too afraid to go away.
Kotsar’s household had no thought what occurred to him.
That they had merely reported him lacking, like so many different Ukrainian troopers caught on the mistaken aspect of the frontline.
He spoke with effort to AP journalists, and at one level requested them to show off the digital camera so he might compose himself.
The AP contacted the Commissioner for Problems with Lacking Individuals Below Particular Circumstances, which confirmed the lacking individual report and his identification via a photograph on file.
Then Kotsar’s personal unit, which had left Izium in disarray, returned and tracked him down.
Kotsar would not know what comes subsequent.
Ukrainian officers are nonetheless within the means of restoring his identification paperwork, and with out them he can’t go wherever.
He would love psychological therapy to cope with the trauma from repeated torture, and for now he’s staying with the monks.
“If it weren’t for them, I most likely wouldn’t have survived in any respect,” he stated.
“They saved me.”
Kotsar’s first name was to the sister of his greatest pal — the one individual in his whole circle of family members he was sure was in a secure place.
He grinned because the connection went via.
“Inform him I’m alive,” he stated.
“Inform him I’m alive and in a single piece.”