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“A Place Where You Regret Being Born”: Inside Russia’s Taganrog Prison
From a detention center for women with children and minors to a torture machine for Ukrainian civilians: since 2022, a prison in Taganrog, in Russia’s Rostov oblast, has been converted into a hell on earth. Through the testimonies of former detainees, open-source research and advanced 3D modeling techniques, Forbidden Stories is able to take you virtually inside the prison for the first time.
(Credit: Washington Post)
By Phineas Rueckert, Guillaume Vénétitay and Tetiana Pryimachuk
April 29th, 2025
With Jarrett Ley and Cate Brown (Washington Post)
When Yelyzaveta Shylyk, a teacher and recently-retired Ukrainian service member, was detained and questioned by Russian military forces in Luhansk, a city in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, her interrogators threatened to send her to a Russian prison camp.
“They said that if I failed, I would go to a place where I would regret being born,” Shylyk remembered. In Taganrog’s SIZO-2, a pre-trial detention center near the Russian city of Rostov, Shylyk came to understand what this meant.
Shylyk is one of nearly a dozen ex-prisoners released from Taganrog who agreed to recount their experiences of illegal detention and torture to journalists at Forbidden Stories and its partners as part of the Viktoriia Project, released today.
Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roschyna spent roughly nine months in this prison, known colloquially as “Russia’s Guantanamo,” before her death in September 2024. Following up on her unfinished work, journalists from the Forbidden Stories consortium interviewed 10 former detainees.
Six of them agreed to participate in a series of “situated testimony” interviews, aimed at recreating the model of the prison from the recollections of those who went through it. These roughly 30 hours of interviews, combined with open-source materials about the prison obtained by the Forbidden Stories consortium, allowed investigators at The Washington Post to piece together a 3-D model of the pre-trial detention center.
A rendering of the Taganrog prison based on situated testimonies from six former prisoners. (Credit: Jarrett Ley/The Washington Post)
At Taganrog, detainees recounted systemic torture: from the notoriously brutal “reception” – an initiation rite for new prisoners that included beatings and humiliation – to, allegedly, an electric chair in the basement.
This type of abuse appears to be systemic across the Russian Federation and the occupied territories since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Ms Danielle Bell, Head of the UN Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, said that they had documented “widespread torture” of Ukrainian civilian detainees and prisoners of war (POW) held by the Russian Federation, including sexual humiliation, contorted stress positions, and severe beatings.
The prisoners from one of the worst of these locations, SIZO-2 in Taganrog, told us about this experience in their own words.
(Warning: the following testimonies contain violent and upsetting content.)
(Credit: Washington Post)
RECEPTION
Dmytro Moskva (POW, detained for one-and-a-half months in Taganrog): We were brought in a regular cargo truck. We understood that we came to Taganrog. I think it was written on the clothes or on the blanket, I don’t remember. There were dogs and they said: “Get out bitches, go against the wall.” And that’s it, they started beating us. Just like that: hard.
Julian Pylypei (POW, detained for one month in Taganrog): It was a very tough reception, there were people who did not live to see the morning. That is, because of internal bleeding.
Yelyzaveta Shylyk (civilian, former soldier from Aidar Battalion [retired], detained for six months in Taganrog): They told me: “Get ready, we’ll show you all the delights of life.” They led me down some corridor where I was punched under the ribs. I was also hit with a baton, a metal rod, on my back, legs, shoulder blades, arms. I was [given an electric shock] for the first time. I was attacked by dogs. Men were shouting at me: “Another Ukrainian whore has been brought in, and we’re going to fuck her.”
DM: The whole event took about six hours. We didn’t see anything at all. You just heard the screams and the dogs… I heard my friend standing next to me [get beaten], and then I understood that it was my turn. They hit [me] with batons. Wherever they wanted, except the head.
A rendering of a typical cell in Taganrog. Prisoners recounted overcrowded conditions during their detention here. Credit: Jarrett Ley/The Washington Post
DAILY LIFE
Volodymyr Labuzov (POW from the 36th Marine Brigade, detained for three months in Taganrog): In all four cells where I was, there was a portrait of Putin.
Sergiy* (POW, marine, held twice in Taganrog): We were not allowed to speak Ukrainian. Only Russian. If they heard you speaking Ukrainian, they would beat you.
DM: At 7:00 or 7:30 a.m., there was a morning check. They would take you out of the room and could hit you a couple of times. It was so unpleasant.
Valeria Subotina (POW from Azov Battalion, detained for seven months in Taganrog): These checks happened twice a day. You are taken out [of your cell] by their special forces, and either you’re beaten or forced to do splits. It’s basically a stretch that not everyone can manage, but they kick you until you sit down.
YS: They took you out into the corridor. There, they would put you in the star pose, with your arms at your sides, palms up, and you had to turn around in the [star] pose, legs spread, and not look up.
Andriy* (POW, active soldier, detained for 7 months in Taganrog): If we had a day without these checks, it was counted as a holiday for us.
S*: They beat us for no reason. There was a video surveillance camera in the cell. They were constantly watching. If you smiled or talked, they could just take you out and give you a beating.
A*: When the girls would come down to do their exercise, they would come on from their floor on the right side of the building, then run through our corridor and then go down further on the left side of the building. Sometimes [they were] singing songs, but also sometimes they screamed.
JP: The operatives who come there are not from Taganrog, someone came from Murmansk, someone else from somewhere else. That is, they come from Russia, they work there for a month and then new ones come.
YS: They were constantly shouting in your ear: Whose Crimea is it? If you answered that Crimea is Ukraine, you could go back to the cell on all fours.
VS: Sometimes they bring you someone who talks normally with you, then bring someone who will use physical force. They actually worked using old KGB methods that you can read about in books.
Multiple former detainees recounted electric shocks while strapped to a chair. (Credit: Jarrett Ley/The Washington Post)
TORTURE
Mykhailo Chapla (POW, detained for 22 months in Taganrog): In the shower, I was given an electric shock. When you’re dry, it’s just a spot, but the water makes the whole body [tremble].
A*: In the corridor, they hung you by handcuffs to a horizontal bar. That is the usual practice of investigators and operatives in the Russian police service. You have these check-ups twice, but then you could also be tortured separately.
VL: They used this boiler room as a torture chamber. And I wasn’t the only one in it.
S*: There’s another room where we were hanged for 10 to 15 minutes. You’re hanging, and you’re being hit on five points. You can’t do anything, your arms are in handcuffs; and your legs, you also can’t [move them].”
YS: They could hit you with a board on your fingers. They could drown you. I was personally put in an electric chair twice with a voltage of 380 volts, with a device that attached clamps between my toes. [They] turned on the current, after [dousing] me in water.
S*: They had all kinds of like materials there, handcuffs, long sticks to beat people with: all that kind of stuff.
VS: They beat you either with a baton or by hand. There was choking. It’s the scariest because when they strangle you, you lose control of yourself.
S*: There were, of course, people who could not stand it, they hung themselves on the bars.
*Names have been changed at the request of interviewees.
**None of the Russian officials solicited by the consortium – the Kremlin, the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), as well as several Taganrog higher-ups – responded to our requests for comment.
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