Inside Putin’s torture hell with ‘people castrated and burned’ – and the doc saving them

A trauma surgeon in Ukraine has revealed the horrific torture civilians have faced from invading Russian forces during nearly three years of brutal fighting.

The most traumatic aspect of work was treating civilians who soldiers had tortured.

Such was the horrific and shocking extent of their injuries, that there was a time when the surgeon felt unable to continue.

“It was in 2022 when there were many casualties when the were killing and abusing the civilian population,” he told the Express.

“They cut them, castrated them, cut off their breasts, burned them with a blowtorch. It was very difficult then, and I was unable to treat civilians with the kind of injuries that these beasts caused.”

have inevitably created a deep and bitter sense of incomprehension and anger.

“How can a mother allow her son to kill civilians in another country, in any country, in , in Georgia, in Armenia?” he said.

“That’s why I don’t understand people in , mothers and fathers, who send their children to this war, so that they could kill people, Slavs – we are also Slavs – so that they could kill and mock. For me, it is very, very difficult, and as a doctor, I say this is a whole society, sick and zombified.”

Asked whether his feelings bordered on hatred, he replied: “I simply hate those people who kill. You know, I worked in a military hospital in Kyiv in 2014 and operated on both Russians and Ukrainians. But if they told me now that ‘Ihor, we need to operate on a Russian soldier’, I don’t know. Now I would probably refuse.”

For the past 25 years, has been living and working in Belgium. Since ‘s full-scale invasion of in February 2022, he has dedicated more and more of his time to helping treat the war wounded in his native country, as well as providing essential medical supplies to hospitals and clinics through his humanitarian mission.

With the help of Dr Günter Constandt’s and Conny Vervynck’s Stay Safe foundation, he has already delivered some 95 trucks of medical equipment, along with one hundred ambulances as part of of ensuring access to quality healthcare for all in .

The challenges facing a community at war

Although he continues to operate on injured soldiers, a key objective of Ihor’s work today is to train more Ukrainian medical staff to help treat war casualties.

“I made a decision that we need to teach others the technologies that we know in Europe,” he explained. “So my concentration today is more on training medical personnel in .

“And I take the best ones, who can teach others, to Belgium for an internship and further training. Plus, we analyze what needs to be brought to a specific hospital, in a specific region. And we collect medical aid and take it to where I know it is definitely needed.”

Our first port of call on this latest humanitarian mission – the seventh to date – was Zbarazh – a small town located in the western part of in the Ternopil region.

It is famous for its castle and is the place where Ihor grew up. The town is also the administrative centre of a wider municipality that has a population approaching 40,000 people.

Ihor works closely with Roman Polikrovsky, the mayor of Zbarazh and his deputy Volodymyr Bohaychuk – a military surgeon. Roman told the Express that supporting families of soldiers killed in the war was the most pressing issue he and his community faced.

This support is not just moral and psychological, but also material. Additionally, Roman is looking to attract financial investment to build and equip more rehabilitation centres for injured soldiers and their families.

Like all communities across , Zbarazh has keenly felt the pain of war. Two thousand of its citizens have joined the army, of whom 70 have been killed.

The most difficult and painful task for Roman is informing families of the deaths of their loved ones – something he described as being “a big test”.

He said Zbarazh was also suffering from the huge exodus of so many people abroad, which was “negatively affecting the development of the community.”

At the moment, there is an urgent need to build new homes to help house internally displaced people, fleeing the war. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that there are around 3.7 million people who are currently displaced within the country. Recently, tens of thousands more have had to leave their homes in the east, as the Russians advance on Pokrovsk.

“Western countries provide a lot of financial aid, arms and humanitarian aid,” he said. “However, it is now important to arrange housing for forced migrants, because many people have lost their homes and they do not have the financial ability to build new ones. As a community, we try to do this as much as possible, but the main emphasis is now on helping the Armed Forces of .”

The fallen and the injured

Everywhere you go in , you are reminded of the fallen – memorials depicting the photos of soldiers – both young and old, male and female – fill town squares, as well as every institution such as universities and hospitals.

It is the small details that hit you hardest. In Kyiv, someone had left a birthday cake with “30” written on it next to the memorial photo for Vitaly Trukhan. Born on 8th September 1994, he died on 12th March 2022.

And then there are the countless injured. Normally twice a week a train carrying wounded soldiers arrives in Ternopil from the front.

This time the train came from with some forty-five soldiers on board. The numbers vary. On one occasion there were as many as 170 injured soldiers, according to medical staff.

The train was made up of seven carriages, which were divided into two as it approached. Four carriages carrying the seriously injured were shunted to a platform, where ten ambulances were waiting. The other three containing the walking wounded were taken to another platform, where two buses were parked nearby.

The injured soldiers were then transported to various hospitals in the Ternopil region to continue their recovery.

At one of the hospitals, staff said they had treated around 10,000 soldiers since the beginning of the war. The soldiers’ wounds are often severely infected, making their recovery much more difficult.

A member of the medical team explained: “They pick up the first infection on the front line, second infection in a train or a bus or during their evacuation. And they (the wounds) become very infectious and it’s hard to cure them. Because they’ve had so many infections from different places.”

In one hospital we met Yuri, 43, an injured sapper, who had been deployed to the region and had seen action in . He was working in the Netherlands when war broke out. He decided to return home and immediately signed up to fight.

His injury occurred as he was getting out of his vehicle to begin clearing a minefield to allow his unit to advance. As he got out and was about to start his work, a 120mm mortar round landed close by. His leg was hit by fragments from the exploding munition.

Initially, surgeons had wanted to amputate his leg, but the head of the department insisted it could be saved. Yuri has been receiving treatment for nine months now and is still confined to a wheelchair, but his family lives not far away from the hospital in Kamianets-Podilskyi and he gets to see them regularly.

He has a seventeen-year-old son and a thirteen-year-old daughter and said he is extremely proud of both of them.

An ingenius solution?

The figures are sobering. has some 200,000 amputees as a result of the war, according to Mykhaylo Korda – the rector of Ternopil’s National Medical University, which is one of the top centres for training combat medics.

The university boasts a state-of-the-art assimilation centre, where combat medics are trained as well as a neurological department, which helps to treat soldiers with brain injuries.

The number of amputees has created a huge demand for artificial legs and physiotherapists to help with rehabilitation.

Piet Stevens, an entrepreneur from Belgium and head of the company , has invented a device intended to help amputees learn to walk on their artificial legs. He joined Ihor’s mission and believes his device will give amputees a better quality of life and relieve pressure on physiotherapists – numbers of whom are limited.

“The idea is to measure how the foot works, what the foot exactly does, and to allow the physiotherapist to use real-time audio cues so that when the patient walks correctly, they get positive audio feedback,” he explained.

“And this will allow the patient to train more and better. Our clinical study clearly shows that better quality training will increase the rehabilitation and will allow patients to walk better for the rest of their life.”

He added: “In amputation, there are two problems. One is to line out the prosthesis so that the energy consumed when you walk with your artificial leg is reduced. If you have an artificial leg, you consume on average two times as much energy to walk as with your own legs. And so lining out the prosthesis correctly is very important.

“And secondly, you can imagine if you have a prosthesis, you will try to limit the time that you stand on it. You prefer to stand on your good leg. That means you get asymmetry in the walk and asymmetry in the walk over time wears out different parts of your body that are not worn out if you walk symmetrically.”

The device normally costs around €3,000 (£2,500) per unit. Piet wants to launch a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds that will allow to purchase initially 50 devices at a limited cost. He hopes then to extend the scheme so that many more can be provided.

Maintaining the morale of the public after almost three years of gruelling war is a vital job for the leaders of local communities. And the strains are showing.

Although the Ternopil region has been spared the worst, the threat of a missile attack is ever-present, with frequent air raid alerts.

Marianna, a local politician, whose husband served two years in the army, admitted that the anxiety induced by the fear of her apartment building being struck by a missile was keeping her awake at night. She also said she did not want to start her own family until the war was over – a view held by many of her friends.

Galina, a teacher spoke of the difficulty of reassuring frightened children during air raid alerts.

has indiscriminately targeted cities and towns across with its ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as glide bombs and drones.

According to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, by the end of this August, there were 36,357 civilian casualties – that is more than the population of Windsor in the UK. This includes 11,743 who were killed, around 600 of whom were children.

In an attempt to provide a boost to community spirits, Roman organised a major public event to celebrate the historical and cultural ties between Zbarazh and Belgium.

Zbarazh and the Belgian aristocrats

Zbarazh and its castle, along with the general area, once belonged to the de Ligne family, one of the oldest Belgian noble dynasties, dating back to the eleventh century.

The current head of the family, Prince Michel de Ligne, travelled down with his friend Baron Bernard de Gerlache de Gomery, to attend a ceremony at the castle on Monday, September 9.

The aristocrats, both in their seventies, drove to Zbarazh in a Nissan Alpha pick-up truck they had purchased before the trip and which they then handed over to the community. The truck will be used to ferry injured soldiers from the front to the first medical checkpoints.

Roman described Prince Michel as someone who “strongly cheers for Ukrainian people”. He added he was convinced that the Prince’s visit was the beginning of “a multifaceted cooperation” between Zbarazh and the municipality of Beloeil in Belgium, home to the nobleman’s residence.

Baron de Gerlache de Gomery told the Express that it was important to show solidarity with .

“It is a duty to participate even in a modest way to the resistance against the aggressor and occupant,” he said.

He also spoke of their admiration for the people’s resilience and their compassion for all those injured and scarred by war.

Resilience and defiance are still in abundance despite the difficult circumstances. Here there is no talk of defeat.

Colonel Vadim Lastovytsky, 40, runs a local military academy for 15 to 18 year olds. Vadim fought for five years between 2014 and 2019 in the east against Russian proxies, after they seized parts of the Donbas.

He insisted that would emerge victorious from its struggles, saying: “Today, even though we are at war, you can ask any small child or a pensioner, and each of them does not doubt for a second our victory.

“Whatever the circumstances, we all know for sure that we will win. If they (the West) help us, we will win much faster, we will win with fewer casualties. If they don’t help us, we will also win, definitely, but with greater casualties.”