Extract from ABC News
On a mild Saturday morning in May, Anatolii Garagatyi woke early and headed into his back garden.
On a normal weekend, the 70-year-old might have been thinking about a relaxing spot of fishing, but instead he was filled with a deep sense of unease.
Russian forces had recently occupied his village in the Kharkiv region of eastern Ukraine and he was worried they would soon come for him.
"Something made me go outside," he says. "I went out and was standing there when I heard the gate slam."
The amateur filmmaker had taken video of Russian tanks arriving near his village and uploaded it to his YouTube channel.
He knew it was a seditious act in the eyes of the occupiers.
Hearing voices approaching, he rushed to hide behind a wood pile in his barn, but a short time later he was found.
"There were eight Russian soldiers," he says. "I noticed they had my video camera, which my wife was forced to give them. They beat me and took me to the garage of the village council."
After about five hours, a man arrived to interrogate Garagatyi and the torture tools were brought out.
"They connected an electric current to my feet and they started torturing me with electric shocks," he says.
"When they did it for the third time, I fainted. I realised I was not able to bear it anymore."
After being tortured, Garagatyi admitted he had spoken to a nameless Ukrainian army officer who had called him and asked what direction the tanks were heading.
Things would only get worse after his confession. "They put a sack on my head and beat me, and took me to Balakliya police station."
He would be held there and tortured over the next 100 days.
Uncovering a house of horrors
Whenever Ukrainian villages, towns and cities are liberated, the horrors of life under Russian occupation are revealed for all to see.
In September, the Ukrainian army launched what is now considered one of the greatest counter-offensives in modern warfare.
In the Kharkiv region, 10,000 square kilometres of territory was recaptured in just a month.
After these areas were retaken, local police say they found 23 torture chambers where civilians like Garagatyi had been held and interrogated.
During the occupation it was common for Russian forces to take over local police stations and turn them into jails and interrogation centres.
In some cases, men and women were jailed and tortured simply for being patriotic.
"In these places, people with pro-Ukrainian views were brought here," says Serhii Bolvinov, chief investigator of the Kharkiv Regional Police.
In the days after the city of Izyum was liberated, Bolvinov took Foreign Correspondent for a tour through the local police station as his team of investigators gathered evidence of torture and war crimes there.
"Any civilian they disliked could be brought in," he says. "In other torture chambers, they captured people whose brothers or other relatives were in the armed forces of Ukraine.
"The Rashists (Russian fascists) were trying to suppress the resistance among the ex-police officers, soldiers and law enforcement officers, bringing them in here and jailing them in such inhuman conditions, interrogating and torturing them."
The jails were overcrowded and kept in an appalling condition.
As we interviewed Serhii Bolvinov inside one of the cells we got a sense of how difficult it would have been.
The cells are dark, damp, cold, unventilated, cramped and smell like a sewerage works. In the corner remained unemptied buckets of human excrement.
Desperate messages carved into the walls give some insight into the hell these detainees went through.
One says, "29 June 22, Alexei". Below a sign of a crucifix it says, "God save us."
A harrowing search for the missing
In a mass burial site in the forest outside of Izyum, more than 440 bodies were found after the area was liberated.
Local authorities say some bodies that have been exhumed show signs of torture, including evidence of hands being tied behind backs and castration.
"There were two men, one of whom had a completely amputated scrotum and fractured limbs, and another one had a stab wound to the scrotum," Yevgen Sokolov, the Kharkiv prosecutor, told Foreign Correspondent.
Serhii Bolvinov is used to calmly and rationally gathering evidence as he works through each investigation he is assigned to.
But he struggles to contain his emotions when asked how it feels to uncover evidence of torture across his region.
"Obviously, this is a horrible story for us," he says. "I'm from Kharkiv. This is my land. And when we see such premises, we are filled with hatred," he says.
"Even though [the Russians] speak the same language … they are so far from us.
"They are true representatives of the terrorist state and hatred overflows each of us when we see such places of torture."
'They wanted me to praise Putin and his war'
For 35 years Anatolii Garagatyi and his wife spent their summers holidaying on the Oskil River in eastern Ukraine.
He would fish and Natasha would watch birds and study insects. They were idyllic months spent in each other's loving company.
Instead of spending the summer of 2022 outdoors with his wife, the 70-year-old was locked into a cramped cell at the Balakliya police station at the mercy of his Russian torturers, wondering when it would be his turn to be interrogated or beaten again.
At one point his captors insisted he record a video message declaring that he was in favour of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
"They wanted me to praise Putin and his war," he says, "as if they were liberators, liberating Ukrainians from something."
He says the Russian soldiers set up the camera equipment and told him they would execute him if he did not record the video.
His mind immediately turned to his family.
"I told [my captors] that a person lives forever. It's just the body that lives on earth," he says.
"But the soul is eternal and I don't want my soul to meet my parents up there and they would see that I was a traitor. I said, 'I cannot betray neither my family nor my wife'."
Garagatyi says his captors became enraged and told him he would be shot in an hour.
"I went and washed myself and asked the guys [in the cell], 'Tell my beloved wife Natasha and my children that I love them and will never forget them. I'm ready to die for them'.
"I was waiting for an hour, then for 10 hours. They didn't come.
"Three weeks later they came back and were like, 'So, grandpa. We didn't shoot you then, so we are going to shoot you now, if you refuse'.
"I told them, 'I'm ready'."
This barbaric game continued until he was released in September.
He says the Russian soldiers ran away as Ukrainian forces closed in on Balakliya and the torture chamber was finally liberated.
Garagatyi and his cellmate Serhii walked out together. His friend had his car parked outside the police station and he dropped his comrade home.
"My wife was waiting here," he says, weeping at the memory of the moment he was reunited with his beloved Natasha.
"We hugged and kissed. We hadn't seen each other for 100 days. I am deeply grateful to her, that she brought me out of there with her prayers.
"I felt it. She prayed and made her friends and everyone she knew join her in her prayers. Now, I am free."
Fighting a 'war crimes country'
Ukraine's Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov was heading to high-level talks at Germany's Ramstein Air Base when stories began to emerge about the success of the Kharkiv counter-offensive.
"My first meeting was with my friend, and friend of my country, Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Defence of the United States and [General] Mark Milley," he tells Foreign Correspondent.
"They asked me about what is going on [with the offensive] and they applauded us."
A former member of the Soviet Air Force, Reznikov has been pushing the West to provide more long-range weapons and has now seen those efforts pay off.
He says the offensive provided a massive boost for morale, both inside and outside Ukraine.
"The main threat, in my humble opinion, is fatigue syndrome," he says.
"Fatigue syndrome for Ukrainians, fatigue syndrome for our armed forces, fatigue syndrome for our partners in your country and our friends in other countries, in other parts of the world.
"This victory again proved that we can defeat the Russians. We can beat them. It's absolutely possible.
"It means that a small victory can become a big victory. It means that you can believe in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the Ukrainian people.
"You can continue your support. We will continue to beat them and we will kick them out of our country."
Reznikov says he is not surprised by revelations of torture chambers in the Kharkiv region and other territories that have been liberated.
"I saw it before," he says. "I saw it in the Chernihiv district when I was with my military colleagues after the liberation and I saw it in the villages near Chernihiv."
He describes Russia as a "war crimes country" and says that the perpetrators must be held accountable for their relentless attacks on Ukraine's civilian population through shelling, torture and sexual assault.
"We can call it Nuremberg 2, but we have to do it in Kharkiv or in Mariupol or in Izyum, for example. It doesn't matter, but we have to do it," he says.
"We have a case with murderers, looters and rapists, not with a normal civilised army. It's a terrorist country.
"And we would like to get a political decision from all parliaments, like from Australia, that you recognise [Russia] as a country who sponsored terrorism."
'We have already defeated them'
There is a senselessness to the imprisonment and torture of Anatolii Garagatyi that is hard to comprehend.
A loving father, grandfather and husband taken away from his family and subjected to unspeakable acts for the crime of uploading video of Russian tanks.
He says he saw similar abuse of innocent civilians repeated time and time again during his 100 days in captivity, people locked up who weren't told why they were in there, others interrogated for the most unbelievable of reasons.
"There was a guy who was walking from Balakliya to Shevchenkove, and he found a book on the ground," he says. "He took it, thinking that he could sit down and read it later somewhere at the station.
"Suddenly a car stopped by, they checked his belongings and there turned out to be a diagram for some kind of radio in that book. He spent 42 days in prison because of that diagram.
"They aimed to pack the room full of people. To show they were doing something. But in general, there were very few cases when someone was actually put in prison for a reason. Very few."
When asked if Ukraine will win the war, Garagatyi looks incredulous.
"We've already won," he says. "What are you talking about? We already have won! We have already defeated them.
"They don't have any idea … they don't understand why they have come here. They have no idea what they are doing here.
"They're cowards. How are those cowards capable of defeating people like us?"
Watch 'Fighting Back' on Foreign Correspondent tonight at 8pm on ABC TV and iview.
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