The American publication Wall Street Journal claims in its investigation that in the first weeks of Russia's war against Ukraine, senior officials of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) informed "higher-ranking guards" that "there would be no restrictions on violence".
The publication quotes three former FSIN employees who describe "how Russia planned and carried out what UN investigators described as large-scale and systematic torture".
Their stories were supported by official documents, interviews with Ukrainian prisoners and a person who helped Russian FSIN employees leave Russia, it writes the publication.
According to the WSJ, Major General Igor Potapenko, who was the head of the FSIN department for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region and has been the vice governor of St. Petersburg since November 2024, "gathered the special forces of his service at the regional headquarters" to talk about the system, which was "developed for captured Ukrainians".
The usual rules would not apply, he told them, the WSJ claims, and there would be no restrictions on violence. The guards' cameras, mandatory in the Russian prison system, may have been turned off, the publication said.
According to the WSJ, similar instructions were given to FSIN departments in other regions, which led to three years of "merciless and cruel torture" of Ukrainian prisoners. Guards used electric batons and beat the prisoners to inflict maximum damage, denying them medical attention to allow gangrene to develop that could lead to amputation, the investigation claims.
The FSIN has not yet commented on the WSJ publication, and the BBC, which quotes the publication, cannot confirm the allegations made in the publication.
The publication cites its sources as two special forces officers and a medic who entered the witness protection program after giving testimony to investigators at the International Criminal Court. Two special forces officers said they left the prison before being forced to carry out torture, but they maintained contact with their colleagues who remained in Russia, the article said.
A Kremlin spokesman told the WSJ that the Russian and Ukrainian ombudsmen, who monitor the treatment of prisoners, are in contact and that the findings about conditions in Russian prisons are unfounded. "We need to look at individual cases," he told the publication.