You're reading: Police atrocities awaken nation

As clashes between police and protesters intensified since Jan. 19, including the deaths from gunshot wounds of at least two demonstrators, the nation has awakened to realize the brutality and ruthlessness of its police force.

Multiple images of tortured victims, pieces of ammunition and leaked photographs and video evidence exposed mass atrocities.

Torture of victims
In one case, 17-year-old Mykhailo Nyskohuz, a student from Lviv Oblast, was detained by the police and tortured. Bruised and swollen, he described his torture to Channel 5, saying the police sprayed his body with pepper spray, beat him severely and cut his thigh. They also abused him verbally.
“They… said this is revenge for our friend who has been in the hospital for over a month,” he said.
At the same time, he is accused of taking part in mass riots, and can get a prison term of 8 to 12 years for his alleged crime.

The Institute for Mass Information, a media watchdog, says that the attacks on 42 journalists by police in a four-day period seemed intentional.

Some protesters who were captured by the police were tortured, according to a video and a photo from Jan. 22 clashes, leaked by police officers.

The video, posted on Youtube, shows several Berkut officers abusing a naked protester who is forced to walk on snow in sub-zero temperatures and perform various tricks for officers who take photos with the victim.

In a photo leaked via Twitter, protesters are forced to kneel on snow.
A police spokesman said the Interior Ministry will investigate when and where the video was taken.
Interior Minister Vitaliy Zakharchenko “has addressed the staff of the interior ministry and pointed out that such actions are inadmissible, and urged them to adhere to the norms of law and morality,” the ministry said in a statement released several hours after the video surfaced.

Lawyer and human rights activist Eduard Bahirov says the evidence that’s surfacing suggests that police officers are in gross violation of a number of Ukrainian and international laws.

“The police officers, who should protect citizens’ rights, violate human rights and the rights of citizens of Ukraine,” he says. “Making a man to take of the clothes and stand naked on the snow is regarded in Ukrainian legislation and in Universal Declaration of Human Rights as tortures andgnity. According to Ukrainian legislation, such police actions can be punished by imprisonment from three to five years.

Workers are targeted
Berkut stormed into the premises marked with the Red Cross, where people were given first aid, threw stun grenades and tear gas, after which the medical workers were forced to flee the premises, leaving everything behind.

“We could not even imagine that such a thing can happen. That law enforcers despise the activity of the Red Cross… that they think everyone a criminal, including doctors, journalists and common people,” one of the doctors told a witness in a video released on YouTube.

A witness also described a case when a policeman was hit and fell down from injuries in the zone between the protesters and the police on Jan. 21, and a doctor rushed to give him first aid. Other officers started shooting him, and he was forced to retreat into safety.

Vitaliy Sergovskyi, head of Ukraine’s Red Cross International, said that this type of behavior by the police seems to be a violation of the Geneva Convention, of which Ukraine is a member.

“Articles of the Geneva Convention do protect all people using Red Cross emblem, though not all the people who do use it have a right to, and I am pretty sure those conventions can be applied to our situation. However, I don’t think what is happening in Ukraine is war, rather an inside tension,” Sergovskyi says.

Sergovskyi also said that the official Red Cross medical team has never been prevented from helping people and those who were reportedly injured during the conflicts might have broken one of the main Red Cross rules – the rule of safe access. “Help only when you can help, otherwise there might be a situation when there are no staff to help people,” he explained.

Abducted from hospitals
Igor Demchenko, a photographer of Svoboda newspaper and internet publication Light and Shadow, who got an eye injury from a grenade during clashes between Berkut and protesters on Jan. 19, is scared to stay in the Kyiv Oleksandrivska (Zhovtneva) hospital.

This is the same hospital from which two civic activists, Igor Lutsenko and Yuri Verbytsky were abducted on Jan. 21. Both were taken out of the city, severely beaten and left to bleed in the forest. Lutsenko lived to tell the story, but Verbytsky was too weak to crawl, and froze to death, according to the Interior Ministry.

His body, with multiple signs of torture, was found on Jan. 22, his niece Oksana Verbytska said.
Demchenko fears kidnapping too because the police have got a hold of his personal data and have visited his neighbors at home to make inquiries. Other injured activists and protesters have left hospitals after police visited their homes, too.

“I have chance to save this eye. On Monday I’ll get the final (medical) assessment on it,” Demchenko says.

In another hospital, number 17, 15 activists – members of the Ukrainian Union of Veterans of Afghanistan are on duty round the clock to prevent the same problem. They say they want to prevent a case like that on Jan. 22 when dozens of hired thugs and Berkut police officers arrived to the hospital and smashed at least four cars of Automaidan activists, and abducted their drivers.

Police deny any wrongdoing, saying that they were attacked by the activists of AutoMaidan, the offshoot of protest movement that takes the protest to politicians’ home and chases thugs off the streets.

Kyiv Post deputy chief editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at [email protected].