ANTHONY LOYD | DISPATCH
‘Russian torturers argued about socks, then reached for the meat knife’
One Ukrainian survivor recalls the brutality and banality of his captors and how he escaped their grip
Hryhorii Osmakov, 20, says he saw five Ukrainian soldiers tortured and killed in a school basement
STANISLAV KOZLIUK
The Times
The guards began to argue among themselves over who would have the prisoners’ socks soon after the torture session began. The five Ukrainian soldiers, their hands tied, stripped of their combat smocks and boots, bare-chested and already badly beaten, had been dragged into a basement beneath the village school in Novovoznesenske when their Russian captors noticed what they were wearing on their feet. The detail of that envy, seemingly so random in the savagery of all that followed, remains branded in the mind of the one man who says he witnessed what followed.
“The Russians had filled a pail with water and one by one kept forcing the captured soldiers’ heads into it and holding them under for about a minute at a time,” said
