Russia removed all limits on violence against Ukrainian POWs since war's early weeks

The Wall Street Journal reported the information.

Major General Igor Potapenko, head of St. Petersburg’s prison system, sent a direct order to an elite unit responsible for guarding the influx of Ukrainian prisoners: "Be cruel, don’t pity them."

He scrapped standard procedures, instructing guards to remove all restrictions on violence. According to the report, Potapenko also banned the use of body cameras to document guards' actions. Similar orders were issued across Russia — from Buryatia to Moscow, Pskov, and beyond.

Guards applied electric shocks to prisoners’ genitals until the batteries died. They beat prisoners to maximize pain, experimenting with different materials to see what hurt the most. They withheld medical care, allowing gangrene to set in, leading to amputations, WSJ journalists wrote.

Two former guards said they saw Potapenko’s orders as a green light for unchecked brutality.

The violence, they said, wasn’t just about punishing prisoners — it was aimed at breaking them. Russian authorities wanted to make captives more compliant during interrogations, extracting confessions to war crimes or intelligence from those too broken to resist.

• Ihor Kotelianets, head of the Association of Relatives of Kremlin Political Prisoners, estimates that Russian forces are holding at least 20,000 Ukrainian civilians captive.