The abducted mayor of Kherson, Ihor Kolykhayev, was seen in a secret prison of the FSB of the Russian Federation

The abducted mayor of Kherson, Ihor Kolykhayev, was seen in a secret prison of the FSB of the Russian Federation

The Kherson City Mayor Ihor Kolykhayev, abducted by the occupiers in June 2022, was seen in a hidden prison of the Federal Security Service (FSB) on the territory of Crimea. During the capture of the city, war criminals detained the official due to his refusal to cooperate with the Russian occupation administration.

This was reported on Facebook by Anna Mamonova, a war crimes documentarian from the Laboratory of Journalistic Public Interest. She learned this information from a person who spent 2.5 years in the secret FSB prison in temporarily occupied Simferopol and returned to Ukraine.

"He says he saw Kolykhayev, the abducted mayor of Kherson, in the FSB basement. The mayor is holding on," Mamonova conveyed.

She added that the last time it was confirmed to her that the Kherson official is specifically in the FSB basement in Simferopol was in the spring of 2024. In six months, nothing has changed: the Russians hide where they are holding Kolykhaiev and deny the existence of the prison in the basement of the FSB building.

"But people are gradually released from there, return to Ukraine, and secretly share who they saw there. Openly speaking about it is dangerous for the captives," emphasized the war crimes documentarian.

The secret prison in the FSB basement was quickly set up by the Russians in 2022. Mamonova says the invaders abducted so many people in the occupied south — Kherson region, Zaporizhzhya region — and brought them to Crimea that there weren’t enough cells. Thus, in the basement, the war criminals just erected partitions, and this prison has no toilets, washbasins, etc.

"Until 2022, it was the FSB server room. Interrogations are conducted by FSB officers from Russia, not from Crimea. They rotate. A polygraph is used. Beatings. I have no information about electric shock. It is used in the pre-trial detention center. If a person needs to be forced to make a false confession with electric shock, they are transferred from the basement to the pre-trial detention center. There are three in Simferopol, and a fourth is being built. Before the full-scale invasion, there was one on the peninsula," the author noted.

She reminded that Ihor Kolykhayev was abducted by the Russians on June 28, 2022, in the center of occupied Kherson. Until November 2022, he was held in an isolation cell in a temporary detention facility, then transferred with all captives to Oleshky.

He was not in a solitary cell: a person who was also there described how they played homemade checkers and Battleship together. Then the mayor was taken to the Russians’ secret prison in Chongar, which was arranged in a two or three-story dormitory building in the center of the village, where Ukrainian border guards lived until February 24.

"In Chonhar, Kolykhayev was seen by a man who bought his way out of captivity for $7000. He paid for himself, his wife, and nephew. Seven for each... Then the mayor was transferred to Crimea. This is Kolykhayev’s path over 2.5 years in captivity. I have no evidence that the mayor is being tortured in the direct sense — beatings, electric shock. But any captivity is always maltreatment. And a crime," concluded Mamonova.