The Observer reports:

A dog came bounding over as Oleh Bondarenko walked towards the garden containing the burned-out house where he had been beaten, tortured and left to die. “Hey, friend,” he shouted, stroking her head and explaining the affectionate greeting. “I talked to her a lot when I was here”.

He lost several teeth to Russian assaults, his torso is covered with scars, and the damage to his spine may be permanent. But his sense of humour has somehow emerged unscathed from a days-long ordeal at the hands of Russian soldiers who served in Syria before bringing some of the horrors of that war to the once-bucolic countryside outside Kyiv.

“My small house,” he said with an ironic smile, peering down into a concrete pipe sunk into the ground to serve as a water cistern. It is not deep enough to stand in when the manhole cover is on and not wide enough to sit down; it is just about large enough to hold a man hunched over in a kind of slouch. Bondarenko was kept here for two days in March, slowly losing all feeling in his arms and legs, and then all ability to move them.

Russian forces had arrived in Motyzhyn, just south of the main highway that leads west out of Kyiv, five days into the war. In a small wood on its outskirts they hid a battery of Grad rocket launchers and other artillery, excavated dugouts for dozens of troops, then set up camp to torture and murder civilians in the compound beside their position.

By the time Bondarenko was brought there – blindfolded on top of a truck after beatings, mock executions and other torture at his home and then an abandoned farm – the soldiers had set up a grim routine, which they worked through each day in a drunken bloodlust.

“It was systematic,” he said. The grass next to the large porch of a storehouse was used for torture by officers who rested and ate under the canopy. The ruins of the bombed-out house was where executions took place, and in the nearby woods they dug shallow mass graves for victims.

This nightmare was presided over by three men who had been shaped in a conflict notorious for abuses. Trapped in his underground chamber, Bondarenko heard them gloat about their transfer to Ukraine. “They said that, after Syria, it was like a fairytale for them here,” he said. “It is a wealthy village, and there was plenty for them to steal.”

It has been clear since the invasion began that troops and officers fighting there included many who had been in Syria. But Bondarenko’s testimony now links some of the worst abuses of this war to men who were on the ground thousands of miles away, defending the regime of Bashar al-Assad. [Continue reading…]