According to a Ukrainian official, about 600 people are “being held hostage” in “rooms designed as torture chambers” and “pre-trial detention” facilities in the Russian-occupied Kherson region.
Half of the 600 are being held hostage “in the Kherson Regional State Administration Building, in a pre-trial detention center, and in vocational school No. 17 in the city of Henichsk,” said Tamla Tasheva, representative of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Crimea. Said during a televised address on Tuesday, citing government agencies and activists who had recently fled the occupied territory.
CNN could not independently verify Tasheva’s claim and has reached out to the Russian Defense Ministry for a response to the allegations.
Tasheva described them as “civilian hostages, activists, journalists and military prisoners of war (POWs)”, some of whom claimed to have been taken from Kherson to Simferopol – the second largest city in Russian-occupied Crimea. .
Since Russia’s invasion in late February, Russia has occupied almost all of Kherson, located in southern Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials estimate that at least half of Kherson’s civilian population left the area during the war.
In late May, the Russian-established administration in Kherson officially closed the region’s borders to the surrounding Ukrainian government-controlled regions.
Exit points from Kherson had already been unofficially blocked for weeks, according to Ukrainian officials, who alleged that anyone wishing to leave the region was being deported to Crimea.
Efforts by the Russian-established administration to set up military bases in Kherson, and to proceed in what American and Ukrainian officials say would be a fake referendum to make the region a “republic”, would have been in line with other Russians in eastern Ukraine. -Reflects supported areas, continues. ,