The Russian military used a state-owned facility in Belarus to run a "filtration" camp, which multiple sources say was where Ukrainian soldiers and civilians were subjected to torture and other abuses, according to an RFE investigation.
The government-controlled area in the town of Narovlja, in southeastern Belarus near the borders with Ukraine and Russia, was one of several where Russia has checked civilians since it launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Witness statements and analysis of Planet Labs satellite images and Russian television footage allowed RFE and its partners to publicly establish for the first time that Russian forces operated a facility in Narovlja on company land controlled by authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko's Council of Ministers.
While Lukashenko, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has allowed Moscow to use Belarusian territory to shift forces and launch deadly attacks on Ukraine, he has publicly downplayed his government's role in Russia's war of aggression.
However, Yulia Polekhina, a lawyer for the Ukrainian human rights organization Sich, said Lukashenka bears responsibility for the abuses committed at the Russian-run facility in Belarus.
"These filtration camps cannot be built without authorized government officials who have to give their consent," said Polehina, "And when people are beaten, tortured and denied medical care, it is a war crime. can happen without the consent of the authorities".
Human rights activists have documented numerous cases of alleged torture and forced transfer to Russia of Ukrainians who passed through these camps, which Russia has set up both in occupied Ukrainian territory and in Belarus.
Such abuses were also committed in the facility in Narovlja, said the Ukrainians who were taken there and their representatives.
"Civilians were being beaten there. I mean, we heard constant screaming," said Bohdan Lysenko, a Ukrainian soldier who was taken to Narovlya after being captured in March 2022.
Lukashenko did not respond to questions sent to his spokesperson about the Narovlja facility until the publication of this article.
'Some big cooperative'
At the end of March 2022, about a month after Putin launched Russia's war against Ukraine, Larisa Jahodinska's two sons were captured by the Russian army and taken to Belarus.
Jahodinska and her family live in the Ukrainian village of Orane, about 45 kilometers from the border with Belarus. At the time when her sons were taken, the village, like the others north of Kiev, was under Russian occupation.
"They said (my sons) were saboteurs and they took them away," Jahodinska told Ukrainian investigative journalist group Slidstvo.Info shortly after her sons were captured.
The younger son Vladislav was a minor when he was taken, but managed to return home after being placed in an orphanage in Belarus. His older brother is believed to have been taken to Russia.
According to Jahodinska, Vladislav suffered severe beatings while in the custody of Russian forces, and his older brother's ribs were broken when he was beaten with a baseball bat.
Journalists spoke to Vladislav, who said that Russian soldiers packed him and his brother into a van and drove them to Belarus.
"There were border guards there and I asked them where we were. And they said: 'Belarus, Narovlja,'" recalls Vladislav.
Vladislav said that the place where he was held after entering Belarus resembled an abandoned Soviet cooperative. That description matches that given by a Ukrainian soldier who was captured by Russian forces around the same time as Vladislav and his brother, but later returned home as part of a prisoner exchange.
"We were blindfolded. They transported us in police vans. And a friend we were with said that he seemed to have heard Narovlja," said the soldier, who asked not to be named.
He said they were housed in "some big cooperative" where "there was a lot of equipment," including tanks and Soviet anti-aircraft guns.
Using clues provided by Vladislav and a Ukrainian soldier, journalists used Planet Labs satellite images to search for a place in Narovlja where the two men may have been held.
The task was complicated by a lot of military equipment scattered around the place. However, cadastral records reviewed by journalists show that the premises in Narovlja where the Russian army stored equipment and conducted other activities – including a field hospital – are registered to a Belarusian state-owned enterprise.
The filtration camp where Vladislav and other Ukrainians were taken could have been set up in any of these locations. However, progress in locating that place came from an unexpected source - Russian television.
'Propaganda picture'
On March 22, 2022, the Russian television network NTV, loyal to the Kremlin, broadcast a report on captured Ukrainian soldiers. The report humanely presented the Russian invasion forces, showing Ukrainian soldiers being treated and routinely processed.
The report did not mention where the soldiers were being held. However, reporters tracked down one of the captured Ukrainians featured in that report, Lysenko, who said he was taken to Narovlya and heard "constant screaming" from civilians he said were being beaten there.
He told the NTV report that it was a "propaganda picture".
"They didn't show how civilians were interrogated there," Lysenko said.
Like Vladislav and a Ukrainian soldier who asked not to be named, Lysenko described the place where he was being held in Narovlja as "maybe some kind of former cooperative or tractor base."
The journalists sent a link to the NTV report to both Vladislav and the Ukrainian soldier. They confirmed that the captured soldiers were shown in the same "cooperative" where they were held.
Thanks in part to the distinctive building with the destroyed roof shown in the NTV report, as well as military tents seen in several videos, journalists analyzing Planet Labs satellite images were able to determine that the report was filmed on Kamsamolskaya Street in Narovlja on land that was at that time owned by the Pripyatski Alliance company.
The ultimate owner of the state-owned company is the Belarusian Republican Union of Consumer Societies (Belkoopsoyuz), which is overseen by Lukashenko's Council of Ministers.
Pripyat Alliance Director Zinaida Mirutenko, contacted by phone and asked about the filtration camp, forwarded the questions to the Chairman of the Narovlja District Executive Committee, Vladimir Antonenko, a former military officer who worked in Lukashenko's security services.
When contacted by phone and asked about the filtration camp, Antonenko said "You have the wrong number" and hung up.
'They were tortured there'
Polehina, a human rights lawyer with the Sich organization, said one of her clients was a 24-year-old man who was arrested by Russian forces along with his father outside Kyiv in March 2022 and was "forcibly deported" to Naruvlje, where both "held in a filtration camp".
"The father testifies that they were tortured there," said Polehina.
Such forced deportations may themselves constitute a violation of the Geneva Conventions, according to The Reckoning Project, a Ukrainian-American organization that documents human rights violations in Russia's war in Ukraine.
Reports of torture and ill-treatment by Russian forces in Narovlja began to emerge months after the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022.
Irina Badanova, an expert in the Ukrainian military's prisoner release coordination group, said in a July 2022 interview that Narovlja was the site of a "filtration camp where the worst abuses of civilian hostages take place."
"I am sure that Belarus will also be held accountable," Badanova told the Ukrainian media outlet Suspilna Dnipro.
Until then, Jahodinska says that she heard from someone who spent more than a year in prison with her older son in Russia that he was not charged with a crime.
"He said that (my) son was treated like a witness," said Jahodinska.
More than two years after her son's detention and forced deportation to Russia via Narovlja, Jahodinska says she has no other information about his condition or whereabouts.
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