UN chief calls for access to nuclear plant after shelling

Former inmate tells of the screams inside Olenivka detention centre where dozens were burned to death

The UN secretary general has called for inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to be given access to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant after Ukraine and Russia traded accusations over the shelling of Europe’s largest atomic plant.

“Any attack to a nuclear plant is a suicidal thing,” António Guterres told a news conference in Japan on Monday. Ukraine said renewed Russian shelling last Saturday had damaged three radiation sensors and hurt a worker at the power plant, the second hit in consecutive days on the site.

Screams from soldiers being tortured, overflowing cells, inhuman conditions, a regime of intimidation and murder. Inedible gruel, no communication with the outside world, and days marked off with a homemade calendar written on a box of tea.

This, according to a prisoner, is what conditions are like in Olenivka, the detention centre outside Donetsk where dozens of Ukrainian soldiers burned to death in a horrific episode last month while in Russian captivity.

Anna Vorosheva – a 45-year-old Ukrainian entrepreneur – gave a harrowing account of the 100 days she spent in Olenivka after being detained in mid-March at a checkpoint run by the pro-Russian Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) in eastern Ukraine. She had been trying to deliver humanitarian supplies to Mariupol, her home city, which the Russian army had besieged. Separatists drove her to the prison, where she was held until early July on “terrorism” charges.

Now recovering in France, Vorosheva said she had no doubt Russia “cynically and deliberately” murdered Ukrainian prisoners of war. “We are talking about absolute evil,” she said.

The fighters were blown up on 29 July in a mysterious explosion. Moscow claims Ukraine killed them with a US-made precision-guided Himars rocket. Satellite images and independent analysis, however, suggest they were obliterated by a powerful bomb detonated from inside the building.

Russia says 53 prisoners were killed and 75 injured. Ukraine has been unable to confirm these figures and has called for an investigation. The victims were members of the Azov battalion. Until their surrender in May, they had defended Mariupol’s Azovstal steel plant, holding out underground.

A day before the blast, they were transferred to a separate area in the camp’s industrial zone, some distance from the grimy two-storey concrete block where Vorosheva shared a cell with other female prisoners. A video on Russian state TV showed charred bodies and twisted metal bunk beds.

“Russia didn’t want them to stay alive. I’m sure some of those ‘killed’ in the explosion were already corpses. It was a convenient way of accounting for the fact they had been tortured to death,” she said.

Male prisoners were regularly removed from their cells, beaten, then locked up again. “We heard their cries,” she said. “They played loud music to cover the screams. Torture happened all the time.”

Captives arrived and departed every day at the camp, 20km southwest of occupied Donetsk, Vorosheva said. About 2,500 people were held there, with the figure sometimes rising to 3,500-4,000, she estimated. There was no running water or electricity.

The atmosphere changed when about 2,000 Azov fighters were bussed in on the morning of 17 May, she said. Russian flags were raised and the DNR colours taken down. Guards were initially wary of the new prisoners. Later they talked openly about brutalising and humiliating them, she said.

Conditions for the female inmates were grim. She said they were not tortured but received barely any food. “It was fit for pigs,” she said. The toilets overflowed and the women were given no sanitary products. The cells were so overcrowded they slept in shifts.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has called the explosion “a deliberate Russian war crime and a deliberate mass murder of Ukrainian prisoners of war”. Last week, his office and Ukraine’s defence ministry gave details of clues that they say point to the Kremlin’s guilt.

Citing satellite images and phone intercepts, they said Russian mercenaries from the Wagner group carried out the killings in collaboration with Vladimir Putin’s FSB spy agency. They point to a row of graves dug in the colony a few days before the blast.

‘The explosion was a way of accounting for the fact they had been tortured to death’

The soldiers should have been protected by guarantees given by Russia to the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross. Since the blast, the Russians have refused to give international representatives any access to the site.

Other detainees confirmed Vorosheva’s version of events. Dmitry Bodrov, a 32-year-old volunteer worker, told the Wall Street Journal the guards took anyone they suspected of misbehaviour to a special disciplinary section of the camp for beatings.

Vorosheva was freed on 4 July. It was, she said, a “miracle”. She added: “The people who run the camp represent the worst aspects of the Soviet Union.”