Russia is holding an estimated 16,000 civilians in arbitrary detention at 180 separate facilities. Taganrog was the most notorious.
Some weeks after being detained as she attempted to leave a Russian-occupied part of Ukraine in January 2023, Yelyzaveta Shylyk was given a polygraph test. As her interrogators attached the lie detector’s wires to her, they calmly issued a threat about what would happen if she failed the test: “You’ll go to a place where you’ll regret being born.”
That place, she would later find out, had a name: Sizo number 2, a pre-trial detention centre in the southern Russian city of Taganrog.
About Author
More Stories
China considers lifting sanctions on UK parliamentarians as relations warm
Campaigners mount coordinated protests across Europe against ‘touristification’
Australian deported from US says he was ‘targeted’ due to writing on pro-Palestine student protests