Screams from soldiers being tortured, overflowing cells, inhuman conditions, a regime of intimidation and murder. Inedible gruel, no communication with the outside world, and days marked off with a home-made calendar written on a box of tea.
This, according to a prisoner who was there, is what conditions are like inside #Olenivka, the notorious detention centre outside #Donetsk where dozens of Ukrainian soldiers burned to death in a horrific episode late last month while in Russian captivity.
Anna Vorosheva – a 45-year-old Ukrainian entrepreneur – gave a harrowing account to the Observer of her time inside the jail. She spent 100 days in Olenivka after being detained in mid-March at a checkpoint run by the pro-Russian Donetsk People’s Republic ( #DNR) in eastern #Ukraine.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/06/russian-prison-camp-ukrainians-deaths-donetsk #war #russia #mariupol #azov #fsb #zelenskiy #redcross

The fact that the Ukrainian forces had to abandon those territories in the first place was the result of a miscalculation. They had been taken by Russian forces in the early days of the invasion. According to Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the National #Security and Defense Council of #Ukraine, as he noted in a Liga.net article on June 18, Ukraine had expected the main Russian attack to come from the territory of the self-proclaimed #DNR and #LNR and consequently concentrated its most combat-ready units there.
This blunder left the south relatively unprotected for an invasion from #Crimea, which enabled the rapid Russian advance toward #Mariupol and the occupation of #Kherson and #Zaporizhzhia regions. It also created the threat of #Mykolaiv and #Odesa being occupied, while for some time part of the Russian strategy seemed to be to take the entire Black Sea coast of Ukraine, in effect creating a land bridge from Russia all the way to #Transnistria in #Moldova.
Though that has not been achieved and is unlikely to be achievable in light of the successful Ukrainian counteroffensive, what Russia did achieve after the fall of Mariupol is a land corridor to Crimea, which was among #Moscow’s key strategic objectives from the beginning.

https://russiapost.net/politics/occupation #war #un #osce #military #irpin #bucha #culture