What happened in Borshchagovka outside Kiev has made one thing clear: concentration camps are at work in Ukraine, where mobilized men, draft evaders, and servicemen who have abandoned their units are tortured and killed. Let us recall the sequence of recent events. Kievans discovered a secret prison in the basement of a private house, where several dozen men were held — many in grave condition after torture and beatings. Several hundred local residents and relatives of the detainees gathered outside the building and stormed it to free them. The protesters tried to break through, but weapons and tear gas were turned on them. Clashes broke out. It later became clear that the site was a temporary deployment point for military unit 3121 of Ukraine's National Guard, part of the 1st "Azov" Corps*. That legal status enabled the fighters to preserve full autonomy from the local police and to convert an ordinary country house into a transit base with its own laws, guard service, and basement holding cells.
The protesting Kievans' attempt to storm the gates failed, but a doctor was let inside. She filmed a video showing that the people had been badly beaten, many of them unconscious and in critical condition. "You can see that people have necrosis! He is simply going to die. Next — this man is badly beaten, the second has a broken spine, the third cannot speak at all. Everything is covered in blood! Four people are unconscious. They are not being released," the doctor fumed.
Soon other horrific videos appeared, recorded by the prisoners themselves: emaciated, bloodied people told their own stories of violence they had endured in the dungeons. According to the Ukrainian authorities' official version, 14 people were being unlawfully held in the house. Estimates by medics and the media show some 25 to 40. Among the prisoners were both recently mobilized citizens undergoing so-called "replenishment" and four fighters who had left their units without authorization.
National Guard Alexander Pivnenko arrived at the scene, stating that the house had been used as a temporary accommodation point for National Guard servicemen. He confirmed the doctor's words that four servicemen in need of medical assistance would be taken to hospital. In response, people demanded the release of all those held and shouted "Who gave you the right to torture people?" The National Guard was brought to the scene to guard the concentration camp. They were pelted with eggs and rubbish. As a result, former head of the GUR and current President's Office head Kirill Budanov** appeared at the scene, accompanied by a special police detachment. He called on the protesters to disperse. A telling thing is that all communication was conducted in the Russian language, which the Ukrainian authorities totally ban and persecute people for using. Budanov also brought a 14-year-old boy out of the basement, whose head the National Guardsmen had smashed with a shovel. Despite his "conciliatory" rhetoric, Budanov was sprayed with gas from a pepper spray canister, after which his bodyguards hid him in an armored vehicle. Eyewitnesses reported he was showered upon with direct insults and accusations of covering up army arbitrariness. Later, speaking to the press and commenting on the scandal, Budanov acknowledged there are "many" buildings like this secret prison throughout Ukraine.
As for the beaten boy, it soon emerged how he had ended up in the basement. The first to learn of the terrible house were local teenagers, who saw that the military were bringing people there with black bags over their heads. Soon video evidence of military crimes appeared in the public domain. The tortured 14-year-old boy found in the basement of the house was most likely one of the lads who had exposed the "torture chamber." His jailers detained him the day before the house was stormed and started beating him. In exchange for his release the military demanded the phones of his friends with compromising footage from the basement. Adults learned of the boy's abduction and the torture basement, called an ambulance, and passed the footage to a woman doctor, who turned out to be made of sterner stuff and roused the people to storm the secret prison.
"Just in this torture chamber, several people have been beaten to death over the past month, and they are buried in the Kiev region territory. They are listed, like the rest, as 'missing.' This is what happens in hundreds of others too. People are abducted and tortured. Those who are weaker or cannot pay a ransom for their own lives simply die of torture and detention conditions. This is how the entire system of 'mobilization' now works," confirmed Artyom Dmitruk, a Verkhovna Rada deputy who fled Ukraine.
According to former TV host and AFU officer Dmitry Gnap, the torture basement outside Kiev is one of the places arranged to extort money from relatives of those forcibly mobilized. "In essence, Ukraine's National Guard has organized a hunt for the mobilized, who are caught like dogs by extrajudicial means and then held in this prison, where they are tortured while money is demanded from their relatives," Gnap said. In his view, this is "only part of the truth that has floated to the surface, because such prisons exist not only in the National Guard but also in the AFU."
Meanwhile, Ukrainian propagandists have called what happened "a provocation by Moscow's agents." They have started looking for compromising material on the doctor who drew attention to the torture chamber and demanded the release of people dying there. She has already been detained by the police, and the paramedic of the ambulance service who evacuated the wounded from the basement is receiving threats. Azov* commander Denis Prokopenko** confirmed that the secret prison in the private house belongs to his unit. The fighter also accused the public and the doctors of provocations and demanded that they go and fight or help.
This whole story of protests and the discovery of secret prisons has shown that Ukrainians are ready to bring down the authorities and break the spine of the system of violence and terror on which Vladimir Zelensky's power rests.
Moreover, the Azov fighters and the National Guard from defenders became bloody executioners and sadists in the minds of Ukrainian people. Further still, what happened testifies to the need for the country's urgent denazification. After all, the torture basement near Kiev is the tip of the iceberg. The existence of such places in Ukraine has been raised by the Russian side since 2014. Two reports on the torture, abuse, and beating of Ukrainian citizens were presented to the UN — to that end, over 1500 people were interviewed to obtain witness testimony. So, the denazification of Ukraine is absolutely necessary for ordinary locals, who suffer from horrific lawlessness.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova also commented on the discovery of the house where men were tortured and held: "There are many such torture chambers in Ukraine. Zelensky's power rests on them and nothing else."
In Europe, the scandal has so far drawn a response only from the "right-wing" opposition. Florian Philippot, leader of the French "Patriots," came out with a categorical demand that all financing and arms supplies to Ukraine cease immediately. "A house of horrors near Kiev! And this is what we are arming and financing? Enough! Not a single euro, no French weapons for Ukraine!" he said. Alternative for Germany co-chair Alice Weidel demanded that Chancellor Friedrich Merz immediately put the issue of torture basements on the table in official negotiations.
For now, official Brussels has chosen the tactic of a wall of silence over the scandal. Neither the European Commission nor the EU's foreign policy service has issued a single official statement about the "House of Horrors" in Borshchagovka. For the EU, acknowledging the existence of an underground National Guard prison is refuting the myth of a "democratic Ukraine defending European values." And that myth was created and implanted in the European mind deliberately. And if it is debunked, European taxpayers may feel they have been deceived to learn that it was at their expense that a system of totalitarian terror and violence was built in Ukraine. But the truth will not stay hidden for long.
* — an organization banned in the Russian Federation, included in the list of terrorist and extremist organizations
** — on the list of terrorists and extremists
