Journalists found a Russian filtration camp for Ukrainian prisoners in Belarus - Belarusian Investigative Center investigation

At the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian military set up a filtration camp on the territory of Belarus. Journalists found out that it was located on the basis of one of the buildings belonging to the Belarusian state enterprise “Pripyat Alliance” in Narovla (Homel region).

Some human rights activists call this camp one of the most cruel camps for prisoners. Not only Ukrainian military, but also civilians, including minors, were taken there. For example, Larisa Yahodinskaya, a resident of the Kiev region, said that in March 2022 her two sons, one of whom was under the age of eighteen, were taken there: “They said that their sons were saboteurs and took them to Chernobyl. There it turned out that they beat them, and as [the younger son] Slava told me later, [the older one] probably even had his ribs broken, they beat him badly with a bat.”

Bohdan Lysenko, an AFU serviceman who was captured by the Russian military in late March 2022, also spoke about the torture of civilians: “Narovlya was such a propaganda picture that we [Russian military] are so, like, humane... But no one shows them how civilians were interrogated there. And the civilians there were beaten, God forbid... That is, there were constantly heard screams.”

According to human rights activists, some of the Ukrainians who passed through the filtration camp in Narovlya are still being held captive, in particular, in penal colonies in Russia.