In front of the prison at 3, rue Teploenergetikiv, people from the neighborhood are chatting while smoking a cigarette. Behind these walls topped with barbed wire, the Russian army had set up one of Kherson’s detention centers. No one knows how many detainees the prison engulfed, murdered, disappeared or deported to the Russian occupation zone shortly before the reconquest of Kherson by Ukrainian forces. “Three Buses and a Truck” came one night to empty the prison, “about two weeks” before the departure of the Russian army from the city. Since then, the doors have been closed.
Like other neighbors, Serhiy (he only gave his first name, like other witnesses interviewed) often helped released prisoners. “We saw them leaving through the gate, exhausted, miserable, haggard. They walked slowly down the street in their shoes without laces. » So Serhiy and other neighbors would give them some food and, most of them coming from other towns and villages in the area, they would ask them if they needed a car to go home. “In Kherson, many people knew that there was a Russian torture center here”says Andriy. “A released prisoner once said to me: ‘If there is hell on earth, it is here’”says Serhiy.
Vitaliy Serdyuk is, to the knowledge of the neighbors, the only resident of the neighborhood who was detained at 3, Teploenergetikiv Street. He arrives slowly, accompanied by his wife, Yelena. He was a prisoner of the Russian army from August 27 to 30. Like every day of the Russian occupation, which controlled the city of Kherson from March 2 to November 11, Vitaliy Serdyuk, 65, was on his way to his son’s house when the soldiers arrived. His son having joined the Ukrainian forces at the beginning of the war and having sent his wife and their two sons to Poland, Vitaliy fed the dogs and cats there now living alone in the garden, and checked that everything was in order.
“It was the last Saturday in August, around 1 p.m. A dozen soldiers surrounded the house and knocked on the door. I opened them. They ran into the house and took my phone off a table. They made me sit outside and started beating my neck. They searched the house and the garage. They were looking for weapons. They asked me about my son. I told them that I didn’t know if he was in Poland with his wife and sons, or somewhere in Ukraine. » Vitaliy’s answer not being deemed satisfactory, he was then arrested.
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