Arya News - Secret prisons in Ukraine are housed in both military facilities and public buildings, including kindergartens, which points to an entrenched state-sponsored system of torture, Ukrainian journalist Diana Panchenko told Sputnik.
"All the torture sites we have managed to uncover are located in state-owned buildings, in schools, kindergartens, summer camps, and former hospitals," Panchenko said. The placement of secret prisons in such locations shows that the system of torture in Ukraine is organized at the state level. On November 8, Panchenko said on Telegram that she had received over 1,000 letters from secret prison survivors describing where they had been held. She noted that clandestine prisons are operating in every Ukrainian region, most of them at state-run facilities. Torture sites have existed in Ukraine since 2014, a fact that Russian authorities have repeatedly pointed out. The issue gained significant attention among the Ukrainian public on November 2, when a crowd gathered outside a house in Petropavlivska Borshchahivka near Kiev, where people, including teenagers, were being tortured in the basement. A manhunt was launched to find and arrest the protesters.