- Category
- Latest news
Abducted Kherson Mayor Reportedly Held in Torture Facility in Occupied Crimea
- Authors
![Maryna_kulakova]( "Maryna Kulakova")
-924c3c302c27387e19f6c44aaeb98745.png "Maryna Kulakova")
Kherson Mayor Ihor Kolykhaiev, who was abducted by Russian forces in June 2022, is reportedly being held in an FSB torture facility in temporarily occupied Crimea.
This was reported on Facebook by journalist and war crimes documenter Anna Mamonova from the Laboratory of Journalism of Public Interest on December 2.
Russian military forces abducted Kolykhaiev on June 28, 2022. On September 13, 2023, the International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed his prisoner-of-war status.
“I spoke with someone who spent 2.5 years in the FSB basement in Simferopol. It’s a secret prison. The man recently returned to Ukraine and said he saw Kolykhaiev, the abducted mayor of Kherson, in the FSB basement. The mayor is holding up,” she wrote.
Mamonova noted that she last received confirmation of Kolykhaiev’s presence in the FSB facility in Simferopol in the spring of 2024. Since then, there has been no change.
“The Russians are concealing Kolykhaiev’s location. They deny both his whereabouts and the existence of the FSB basement prison. However, people are gradually being released from there, returning to Ukraine, and secretly recounting who they saw in detention. Speaking openly is dangerous for the captives,” the documenter wrote.
According to her, the secret FSB prison was established in 2022. Many individuals from South of Ukraine were abducted and transported to temporarily occupied Crimea.
Russian forces occupied Kherson on March 2, 2022, making it the first major Ukrainian city captured during the full-scale invasion. The occupation lasted for over eight months until Ukrainian forces liberated the city on November 11, 2022, as part of a major counteroffensive in the South of Ukraine.
Previously on December 4, it was reported that the mayor of the temporarily occupied city of Dniprorudne in Zaporizhzhia region, Yevhen Matveev, who was abducted by Russian forces over 2 years ago, was tortured to death while in captivity.
