Speaking from his hospital bed, prominent activist Igor Lutsenko, bruised and missing teeth but alive, tells a harrowing tale.
“Some men, maybe 10, came
into the hospital… they didn’t say anything and went past doctors… just beat us
and dragged us to a van,” he told the Kyiv Post by phone from Boris Hospital in
Kyiv.
His abductors were thugs with a
political agenda as well, telling Lutsenko during his captivity they were
against the EuroMaidan protests he leads and favor a “Slavic union” between
Russia and Ukraine and oppose closer ties with Europe.
“They drove us maybe 30
minutes to the forest and put us separately in a garage. I could hear Yuriy
(Verbytsky) screaming from the beatings they were giving him,” he said.
Lutsenko was kidnapped in
the early morning hours on Jan. 21, along with Verbytsky, another activist. The
two were taken from Oleksandrivska Hospital by a group of young, athletic men
in plain clothes while Verbytsky was being treated for an eye injury suffered
during clashes with police earlier on Hrushevskoho Street in central Kyiv.
“They (the captors) knew
what to do. They hit me hard enough to cause great pain, but not hard enough to
do serious damage,” he said.
The men eventually dumped
him in the woods, leaving him in the snow and sub-zero temperatures to find
help on his own.
Verbytsky didn’t fare as
well. Having sustained more serious injuries than Lutsenko, the activist didn’t
have the strength to find his way to safety, and was discovered dead a day
later in the forest near Boryspil, a suburb of Kyiv. A plastic bag had been
placed over his head and the remnants of duct tact were found around his mouth
and hands.
News of their kidnapping –
as well as many others – has put EuroMaidan on high alert. Security at occupied
buildings has tightened, and an emergency service, called EuroMaidan SOS, has
been set up to help disseminate information about kidnappings and assaults on
anti-government activists. There are numerous reports of roving bands of thugs
set to attack EuroMaidan participants, particularly prominent leaders.
Speaking on a local news
program, military expert and psychologist Oleksiy Arestovych, called the groups
who are allegedly snatching activists here “death squads.”
“These are people who will
not let you be brought to the prison cell, nor to jail. They kidnap activists
and then we find their dead bodies outside the city. They are tortured,
stripped and bullied,” he said, adding that he believes Russian security forces
are on the ground here and assisting the government in its attempts to quell
public dissent.
“We are dealing not only with the FSB
(Security Service of Russia) conspiracy,
it is a mix of criminals, police and with the
government,” he said.
In order to ensure their
safety, he said it would be a good idea to have firearms among the largely
peaceful EuroMaidan protests.
“I agree with (opposition politician) Anatoly
Gritsenko, and believe that we need to take up weapons and defend the nation
from attempts to suppress it. We should take them up, because people get
stripped and beaten, there are death squads operating,” he said.
Grytsenko this week advocated for carrying of
handguns at the protests, but said that they should be loaded with rubber and
not metal bullets.
Among the more prominent cases of beatings is that
of Tetyana
Chornovol, a well-known activist and journalist, who investigates the murky
business of top Ukrainian officials and has been a regular among EuroMaidan
protests since they began more than two months ago.
Early on Dec. 25, Chornovol was severely beaten by unidentified men on a road near Boryspil. She
spent three weeks in the hospital recovering after suffering a concussion,
broken nose and numerous hematomas.
The police have detained
five suspects involved in the attack on Chornovol and are currently
investigating the case. Chornovol has said that she was specifically targeted
because of her work as an activist and journalist, and her opposition stance
toward the government. But little is known about the men and their reasons
behind their actions.
In the case of Lutsenko and
Verbytsky, “experienced torturers” spent more than 10 hours beating and
interrogating them, Lutsenko said, calling them “some combination of titushki
and some younger personnel, very experienced people and very ideological
people.”
“They did not do this just for money, but are very involved in the
current conflict. And they are passionate about it,” he said, referring to the
current political unrest in the country. “Professional kidnappers and
torturers, for sure. It must be part of their jobs for many years.”
The men told him they supported the idea of a “Slavic union.”
“They say that Europe is trying to make Ukraine a slave. They
say they are against the wave of EuroMaidan and what it represents. The country
is falling into depths and they are trying to save it, they told me. They seem
they are not very well informed in how things really are,” he explained.
So why torture him and Verbytsky?
They use “repressions that should be immediate and get
reaction,” he said. “Treating people according to the law is not enough for (authorities).
They wanted these men to beat people and to give them to police in a sort of
good state to (be made an example).”
He continued: “Regarding Yuriy, maybe they were more brutal,
because he was from Lviv. ‘And if a person is from Lviv, you are an enemy,’
they are all Banderites,’ they told me.”
Chornovol told the Kyiv
Post that she believes all of the beatings and kidnappings are done at the
behest of besieged President Viktor Yanukovyuch, who has been outspoken about
his desire to quell the anti-government mass demonstrations here.
“Human life means nothing
for him,” Chornovol said, adding that things that are happening now are a “real
terror.”
“(Yanukovych and his
government) want to liquidate all of the active participants of Maidan,” she
said, adding that keeping the rally united has become a matter of survival for
the activists. “If we don’t stand on Maidan then they will eliminate us all by
our own houses.”
Kyiv Post editor Christopher J. Miller can be reached at [email protected], or on Twitter at @ChristopherJM. Oksana Grytsenko contributed
to this report.
