95% of Ukrainian POWs report torture in Russian detention, U.N. told

At an informal meeting of the United Nations Security Council, evidence emerged of a systematic pattern: more than 95 percent of Ukrainian prisoners of war who had been interviewed reported experiencing torture or ill-treatment while held by Russian forces. The allegations came from former detainees themselves and from Ukrainian officials, who described a catalog of abuses that included prolonged isolation, beatings, electric shocks, and sexual violence. Thousands of Ukrainian prisoners remain unaccounted for, still held in Russian custody.

The testimony painted a picture of deliberate cruelty. Captives were held incommunicado, cut off from contact with the outside world. The physical abuse was systematic and varied. Electric shocks were administered. Sexual abuse occurred. The pattern suggested not random acts by individual soldiers but something coordinated and intentional.

One man's account crystallized the scale of suffering. Khuan Alberto Levya Garsiya, who remains an active member of the Ukrainian military, spent 1,183 days in Russian captivity. During that time, he said, his captors subjected him to every conceivable form of torture. More than three years in detention. The specificity of that number—1,183 days—carries its own weight, a measure of time that becomes almost incomprehensible when attached to a single person's ordeal.

Russia's response was swift and categorical. Maria Zabolotskaya, Russia's Deputy Representative to the United Nations, dismissed the allegations as a disinformation campaign. She did not engage with the specific claims. Instead, she pivoted to a counter-accusation: Russian prisoners held by Ukraine, she said, had themselves been subjected to torture, degradation, and both moral and physical abuse. The move was familiar—deny, deflect, accuse the other side of the same crime.

The dynamic created a deadlock. One side presented testimony from survivors and documentation of patterns. The other side rejected the premise entirely while making mirror accusations. Neither position left room for the kind of neutral investigation that might establish facts. The prisoners themselves—thousands of them—remained in limbo, their fates uncertain, their cases caught between competing narratives at the international level.

What made the moment significant was not that abuse allegations had surfaced. War produces such claims regularly. What mattered was the scale of the documentation and the venue where it was presented. The United Nations Security Council is where states are supposed to confront each other over matters of international law and human rights. The 95 percent figure, if accurate, suggested not isolated incidents but a widespread practice. The presence of former detainees offering firsthand accounts gave the allegations weight that a government report alone might not carry.

Yet the Russian response showed how such proceedings could stall. Without agreement on basic facts, without a mechanism to compel investigation, the Security Council became a stage for competing claims rather than a forum for accountability. The prisoners remained where they were, and the international system offered them no immediate path to justice or even to freedom.