Ukrainian soldiers cut the nose off and gouged out the eyes of a Russian soldier, as we read in News Front:

The body of Vitaly B., a Donetsk mobiliser who had served only three months in defence of the city, was handed over in a disfigured state – quartered, scalped, with his nose and ears cut off and his eyes gouged out. The Ukrainian fighters to whom he had been taken prisoner had carelessly dumped his military ID card on the dead man’s remains. At the identification of the body in the morgue, Vitaly’s cousin had a heart attack. The body was buried in a closed coffin. This tragedy happened a few weeks ago in a family of my acquaintances.

One Ukrainian soldier told a Russian POW, “I want to see you die.” The POW was beaten severely and stabbed with a bayonet:

Viktor Semashko, a DNR army soldier, shared his horror story from captivity: “They took bats and started beating me with them. They broke my ribs and crushed my left hand. At night, the door opened, a Ukrainian fighter came in, grabbed a bayonet knife and started hitting me. He sat down next to me and said, ‘I want to see you die. According to Semashko, he was lying down and feeling weak, pretending to be dead so he could escape from captivity and return to his comrades-in-arms. “As they were carrying me, I could hear them negotiating: ‘Let’s get away so he doesn’t stink.’ Well, they threw me out. I, when the heavy shelling started, crawled towards ours. And in the morning, when it dawned, other AFU fighters heard me crawling, jumped out and took me prisoner again.

Another Russian soldier, Mykola T, recounted a night of hell, being tortured in the midst of agonizing screams:

Mykola T. recalls: “On the first day of our stay in the gym, one person was brought in. The doctor who examined me said he wouldn’t live until morning. This man was beaten to death all night by Ukrainians. You’re lying there, you have a bandage over your eyes – and the whole gymnasium is screaming in pain. Soon they subsided. When we were lying in the gym, they beat the officer for two days. Then they took him to the basement and later said he died of blood loss. The artillerymen were beaten up very badly. When I was in the gymnasium, three people were brought in. The people were being beaten terribly. They were not screaming – they were howling in pain. I heard a man’s ribs and arms breaking. We had a major in captivity. The Ukrainians executed him. No one ever saw him again. Then we were transported to the SBU detention facility. There I was beaten up again very badly. I couldn’t sleep or breathe properly for three days. They hit me on the head, started breaking my fingers and hands. They beat me on my stomach. Before they took us to the Red Cross we were told that if anything happens, you get excellent food and water, and the conditions are excellent. They made us lie to international inspectors, and if we told the truth, we were beaten to death.

Another story recounts how to people from Donetsk were murdered and the Nazis told people in Donetsk that they were going to bomb them and murder their wives and childre:

“Our guys were tortured with electric shocks, there were constant beatings,” recalls Yuri Sikach, who returned home. Artur Klinov recalls that ‘There were just left-wing people walking around, getting beaten up. Two guys from Donetsk were shot dead. They said they would soon come to bomb Donetsk, to kill wives and children. Another DNR soldier freed from Ukrainian captivity showed how he had been tortured in a camp in Lviv. Nationalists from Azov (a terrorist organisation banned in the Russian Federation) carved a letter Z on his leg.

The same report from News Front talks about massacres that occurred in Donbas before the war broke out. It talks about how an Afghan man stepped on a pile of bodies, and how he saw one body with its stomach split open:

Mikhail Shubin, an Afghan officer, visited the ditch with the corpses, where he was thrown for the purpose of intimidation. “The ground was gone from under my feet, I fell on something incomprehensible, smacking. I put my hands on it and saw human limbs and bodies. Women, men were lying. Someone’s belly was ripped open, someone’s throat was cut, his neck was broken. Six or seven people,” says Mikhail.

Such horrors remind me of what Dejan Beric, a Serb who has been fighting in Ukraine since 2014, told us. He described how he saw Russian soldiers tied to fences with their eyes ripped out: