Exclusive: Belarus State Firm Hosted Russian ‘Filtration’ Camp Where Ukrainians Were Allegedly Tortured

A state-owned facility in Belarus was used by the Russian military to operate a “filtration” camp where multiple sources say Ukrainian soldiers and civilians were subjected to torture and other abuses, an RFE/RL investigation has found.

The government-controlled site in the Belarusian town of Naroulya, near the Ukrainian and Russian borders in the country’s southeast, was one of several where Russia vetted civilians following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Witness accounts and an analysis of Planet Labs satellite imagery and Russian television footage allowed RFE/RL and its partners to establish for the first time publicly that Russian forces operated the Naroulya site on the grounds of a company ultimately controlled by authoritarian leader Alyaksandr Lukashenka’s Council of Ministers.

While Lukashenka, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has allowed Moscow to use Belarusian territory to transit forces and launch deadly attacks on Ukraine, he has publicly downplayed his government’s role in Russia’s war of aggression.

But Yulia Polekhina, a lawyer with the Ukrainian human rights group Sich, said Lukashenka bore responsibility for abuses committed at the Russian-operated facility in Belarus.

“These filtration camps cannot be created without authorized government officials who must give their consent to this,” Polekhina said. “And when people are beaten, tortured, and denied medical care, this is a war crime. And this cannot happen without the consent of the authorities.”

Rights activists have documented numerous cases of alleged torture and forcible transfer to Russia of Ukrainians who passed through these sites, which Russia set up both on occupied Ukrainian territory and in Belarus.

Such abuses were also committed at the Naroulya site, according to Ukrainians who were taken there and their representatives.

“Civilians were beaten there. I mean, we heard constant screaming,” said Bohdan Lysenko, a Ukrainian soldier who was taken to Naroulya after his capture in March 2022.

Lukashenka did not respond to questions sent to his spokesperson about the Naroulya site in time for publication.

‘Some Large Collective Farm’

In late March 2022, about a month after Putin launched Russia’s all-out war on Ukraine, Larysa Yahodynska’s two sons were captured by the Russian military and taken to Belarus.

Yahodynska and her family are residents of the Ukrainian village of Orane, around 45 kilometers from the border with Belarus. At the time her sons were taken, the village, like others north of Kyiv, was under Russian occupation.

“They said that [my sons] were saboteurs, and they took them away,” Yahodynska told the Ukrainian investigative journalism group Slidstvo.Info shortly after their detention.

The younger son, Vladyslav, was a minor when he was taken away, but he managed to return home after being placed in an orphanage in Belarus. His older brother is believed to have been taken to Russia.

According to Yahodynska, Vladyslav suffered severe beatings while being held by Russian forces, and his older brother had his ribs broken while being beaten with a baseball bat.

Reporters spoke with Vladyslav, who said that the Russian soldiers packed him and his brother into a van and drove them to Belarus.

“There were border guards there, and I asked them [where we were]. And they said: ‘Belarus, Naroulya,'” Vladyslav recalled.

Vladyslav said the place where he was held after entering Belarus resembled an abandoned Soviet collective farm. That description matched one given by a Ukrainian soldier who was captured by Russian forces around the same time as Vladyslav and his brother but later returned home in a prisoner exchange.

“We were blindfolded. We were transported in police vans. And another comrade we were with said that he seemed to have heard Naroulya,'” said the soldier, who requested anonymity.

He said they were placed in “some large collective farm” where “there was a lot of equipment,” including tanks and Soviet antiaircraft guns.

Using clues given from Vladyslav and the Ukrainian soldier, reporters employed Planet Labs satellite imagery to search for the site in Naroulya where the two men might have been held.

The task was complicated by clusters of military equipment scattered throughout the town. But cadastral records reviewed by reporters show that the areas in Naroulya where the Russia military stored its equipment and set up operations — including a field hospital — were registered to Belarusian state enterprises.

The filtration camp where Vladyslav and other Ukrainians were taken could have been set up in any of these locations. But the breakthrough in locating the site came from an unexpected source: Russian television.

‘A Propaganda Picture’

On March 22, 2022, the Kremlin-loyal Russian television network NTV aired a report about Ukrainian soldiers who had been captured. The report painted a humane portrait of the invading Russian forces, with Ukrainian soldiers shown undergoing medical treatment and routine processing.

The report made no mention of where the soldiers were being held. But journalists tracked down one of the captured Ukrainians shown in the segment, Lysenko, who said he had been taken to Naroulya and had heard “constant screaming” from civilians he said were being beaten there.

He described the NTV report as a “propaganda picture.”

“They didn’t show how civilians were interrogated there,” Lysenko said.

Similar to Vladyslav and the Ukrainian soldier who requested anonymity, Lysenko described the place he was held in Naroulya as “maybe some kind of former collective farm or tractor base.”

Reporters sent a link to the NTV report to both Vladyslav and the Ukrainian soldier. They confirmed the captured soldiers were shown at the same “collective farm” where they had been held.

Thanks in part to a unique building with a destroyed roof shown in the NTV segment, as well as military tents seen on several videos, reporters analyzing Planet Labs satellite imagery were able to establish that the report had been filmed on Kamsamolskaya Street in Naroulya on territory owned at the time by a company called Pripyat Alliance.

The state-owned company’s ultimate owner is the Belarusian Republican Union of Consumer Societies (Belkoopsoyuz), which is overseen by Lukashenka’s Council of Ministers.

Reached by telephone and asked about the filtration camp, Pripyat Alliance director Zinaida Mirutenka referred questions to the head of the Naroulya district’s executive committee, Uladzimer Antonenka, a former military officer who worked in Lukashenka’s security services.

Reached by phone and asked about the filtration camp, Antonenka said, “You have the wrong number” and hung up.

‘They Were Tortured There’

Polekhina, the human rights lawyer with Sich, said one of her clients was a 24-year-old man who was detained along with his father by Russian forces outside Kyiv in March 2022 and was “forcibly deported” to Naroulya, where both men were “held in a filtration camp.”

“The father testifies that they were tortured there,” Polekhina said.

Such forced deportations themselves may constitute a violation of the Geneva Conventions, according to The Reckoning Project, a Ukrainian-American organization chronicling human rights abuses in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Reports of torture and abuse by Russian forces in Naroulya began surfacing within months of Russia’s February 2022 invasion.

Iryna Badanova, an expert with the Ukrainian military’s coordination group for prisoner release, said in a July 2022 interview that Naroulya was the site of “a filtration camp where the greatest abuse against civilian hostages occurs.”

“I am sure that Belarus will also be held accountable,” Badanova told the Ukrainian media outlet Suspilne Dnipro.

Yahodynska, meanwhile, says she heard from someone who had spent more than a year in prison with her elder son in Russia that he had not been charged with a crime.

“He said [my] son was being treated as a witness,” Yahodynska said.

More than two years after her son’s detention and forcible deportation to Russia via Naroulya, Yahodynska says she has no other information about his condition or whereabouts.