A senior Russian army lieutenant who fled Russia told ABC News he witnessed his country's troops torture prisoners in Ukraine, including beating and threats to rape them.
1:22A senior Russian army lieutenant who fled Russia told ABC News he witnessed his country's troops torture prisoners in Ukraine, including beating and threats to rape them.
Yefremov has provided ABC News with documents confirming his identity as well as photos and videos that ABC has verified show him in southern Ukraine during the period he describes.His unit, the 42nd Motorised Rifles Division -- usually based in Chechnya -- entered Ukraine from Crimea in the first days of the invasion, according to Yefremov.
Yefremov said he was present when a drunken colonel began interrogating a young Ukrainian soldier who had admitted to being a sniper."They broke that prisoner's nose, they knocked out his teeth," said Yefremov. For more than a week, he said, the colonel tortured the Ukrainian POW everyday, subjecting him to a mock execution and threatening to rape him.
"I'm not trying to excuse myself. Or show how humane I was -- I understand I shouldn't have been there at all," he said.ABC News is unable to independently verify Yefremov's torture allegations, but they resemble similar accounts of torture and abuse of prisoners by Russian forces widely documented in Ukraine.
Yefremov said most Russian troops had little motivation to fight and that the majority did not believe the Kremlin's justifications for the war, such as its claim to be "de-Nazifying" Ukraine. Yefremov said when he was rotated home to Chechnya in May, he decided he would not return to Ukraine. He refused an order to re-deploy and was accused of insubordination, after which he was discharged from the military in October.
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