According to the Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Emine Dzhaparova, for the eighth year in a row, the Russian Federation has been committing crimes against Ukrainian citizens on a daily basis. They use torture and psychological pressure on illegally detained both in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine and in the territory of the Russian Federation. The illegal ‘Isolation’ prison in the occupied Donetsk is a vivid example of these horrors and identifies the true face of Russian occupiers.

Dzhaparova stressed that in the occupied Donetsk and Luhansk, there are more than 160 illegal objects and more than 3,500 citizens of Ukraine are illegally detained in them.

‘We are working together to close all secret prisons in the occupied territories of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts established by the Russian Federation. We demand from the Russian occupiers to grant regional and international human rights organizations full access to all places of imprisonment and to ensure confidential communication with all detainees in the temporarily occupied territories’, she added.

The Deputy Foreign Minister also reminded that even Mr. Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture, was denied full and unimpeded access to detention facilities in Donbas during his visit to Ukraine in 2018 by the Russian occupation authorities.

‘Ukraine will take all necessary steps to bring to justice all those responsible for human rights violations and war crimes’, Dzhaparova concluded.