Russian troops made a Ukrainian woman kneel in front of her husband’s grave in a ‘mock execution’.

A Ukrainian woman says she has been reduced to a “living corpse” after months of alleged torture by Russian troops in occupied Kherson.

Oksana Minenko, 44, says Russian soldiers dipped her hands in boiling water, pulled out her fingernails and beat them with rifle butts while she was held down.

“One pain grew into another,” Minenko told Reuters in December. “I was a living corpse.”

Since the southern region was liberated from Ukraine last November after eight months, a catalog of Moscow’s atrocities has slowly been building.

Minenko was one of them. She said her husband, a soldier, died on the first day of the invasion.

Soldiers came to his funeral and forced Mineko to kneel at his grave while firing their automatic weapons in a mock execution, she said.

Their grief gave way to fear as Russian troops raided homes or dragged people off the streets – Ukrainian officials estimated that at least 600 people were abducted during the occupation and many more were reported missing.

Men in Russian military uniforms and balaclavas have broken into Minenko’s house at least three times to question and arrest her.

“When you have a bag on your head and you get hit, there’s such a vacuum, you can’t breathe, you can’t do anything, you can’t fight back,” she said.

Dozens of victims, Ukrainian police officers and prosecutors told Reuters how routine torture was: Russian troops electrocuted people’s genitals and other body parts, beat people up and suffocated them in various ways.

Others were dragged into overcrowded cells without sanitation, food, water or even sunlight for up to two months.

The sounds of tortured men still haunt 47-year-old Liudmyla Shunkova. “They were screaming, it was constant, every day. It could go on for two or three hours,” she said.

Andriy, 35, said the electric shock that raced through his genitals was like a “ball that goes into your head and you pass out”.

While Reuters said it was unable to verify the victims’ claims, their reports fit a pattern of suffering allegedly taking place in occupied territories.

Ukrainian officials and survivors said Russian troops are attacking and torturing those they believe are “local patriots” or “refuse to cooperate with the occupiers”.

They are taken to underground torture chambers, as witnesses report, soldiers roaming the streets suddenly start beating people for no real reason.

Detainees have described how their captors often questioned them about the Ukrainian military, such as where weapons and explosives were stored.

Andriy Kovalenko, prosecutor general for war crimes in the Kherson region, said: “This has been carried out in a systematic and comprehensive manner.”

Another 400 people were illegally detained there, said Yuriy Beluzov, Ukraine’s chief prosecutor for war crimes. One of the largest was an office building in the city of Kherson, reportedly with more than 30 crammed into a single basement.

Reuters said during a visit to the basement in December that the “smell of human excrement filled the air”.

Belousov added that he received testimonies from people forcibly deported to Russian territory.

Ukrainian authorities have launched a preliminary investigation into more than 1,000 people in the Kherson region, who are believed to have been abducted and wrongfully detained.

So far, while the investigation continues, officials have located at least 10 apparently illegal “detention places” where at least 200 people are said to have been tortured.

Prosecutors across the country have launched investigations into the alleged unlawful detention of more than 13,200 people.

Ukrainian authorities have registered more than 50,000 reports of war crimes.

However, officials have warned that the actual toll is likely to be much higher given the length of time some regions have been occupied.

Russia has long denied committing war crimes in its so-called “special military operation” against Ukraine.

However, a United Nations-appointed commission said war crimes were being committed in the Russian-occupied regions of Ukraine, including women who were victims of sexual violence.

UN investigators in Ukraine say they have received numerous cases of Russians torturing civilians – sometimes resulting in death.

After speaking to more than 1,000 victims and witnesses, UN leaders said three Ukrainian men had been found dead in a cellar in the capital Kiev, their hands and legs bound and their fingers cut off.

The UN report states: “In March 2022, two Russian soldiers entered a house in the Kiev region and repeatedly raped a 22-year-old woman, sexually assaulted her husband and forced the couple to have intercourse in her presence.

“Then one of the soldiers forced her four-year-old daughter to lead him to oral sex, which amounted to rape.”

Metro.co.uk has contacted the Russian government for comment.

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