“We wasted 15 meters of duct tape on you”. 61‑year‑old Gennady Kapralov, captured in the occupied Melitopol, testifies about torture

The neighbour

Before his arrest, Gennady Kapralov was a handyman. In 2022, he got a new neighbour—Dilyaver Kurshutov, who worked as a finisher.

“A builder can spot another builder from a mile away. When we talked, I realised he was a decent craftsman and a decent person; I never heard him swear. I know he doesn’t drink,” Kapralov said in court. In occupied Melitopol, it was hard to get building materials, and neighbors “found out through each other what was left at the supply depot.”

“People were scared” in the occupied city. “Few could trust anyone. Because it was a gray zone: explosions, stores weren’t open, soldiers on the streets would stop and search men. They checked me for tattoos a bunch of times, too.” At a time like that, you especially appreciate people you can trust, Kapralov said. And he trusted Kurshutov. His neighbour willingly “gave advice on repairs” and told him what materials he used, even though craftsmen usually don’t share their professional secrets.

The cemetery

In mid-summer of 2023, Kurshutov asked Kapralov to go with him to the old cemetery to “pick something up there.” The site was “abandoned, with dense graves, trees, and snakes; you couldn’t even walk through it.”

The neighbours went there on bicycles. Kapralov watched the bikes by the fence while Kurshutov searched for the right grave. The search was unsuccessful, so the men had to return to the cemetery the next day. That time, Kurshutov found a “rolled-up dark-colored bag.” Kapralov didn’t know what was inside, but Kurshutov called the object “dangerous.” Kapralov didn’t ask any questions: “That’s how we do things in Ukraine: we try to help each other first, and then find out what we helped with.”

They took the bag to Kurshutov’s home. A few days later, Kapralov stopped by to see him. “When I came he said, ‘Don’t you want to see what’s in there?’ I said, ‘Well, let’s take a look.’” Inside the bag from the cemetery were “two juice cartons and some other small bags.”

Kurshutov “later said that they were explosives,” and a man named Sasha—“some military acquaintance of his who was either in Kyiv or Zaporizhzhia”—had asked him to pick them up from the cemetery. The defendant’s acquaintance explained that someone would come to pick up that bag from him as well.

At the end of July, Kurshutov asked Kapralov to go with him to the cemetery again to get the “sealed box in a bag” that he hadn’t taken the first time. Kapralov was watching the bikes again—“I stood there, he went over; it was all overgrown, impossible to get through.” Kapralov “had a little basket on his bike—to put bread in,” so on the way back he offered to take the box for himself: “Let me keep it for now; you can pick it up sometime later.” He hid the box in the yard “near the fence—it’s my fence, no one will touch it there” and covered it with “a small stone.” The fence was rundown and crooked.

Captured

On August 21, 2023, Kapralov and his wife Olga were walking “down the street—I think it was Alexander Nevsky Street—where the car wash is.”

“Some people approached us: ‘Your documents, your passport.’ ‘Here you go: passport, registration, I have everything, take a look.’ I guess they were surprised to see a Ukrainian passport.” The security officers said the couple was being detained “pending investigation.” They took the couple’s documents and phones and shoved them into a white car, where young men in plain clothes were sitting.
“Somehow, one word led to another,” Kapralov recalled, and “it just happened” that one of the security officers “put his hand there in a strange way.”

“I told him, ‘Take your hands off me’—and he said, ‘Why are you fighting, this and that!’ Anyway, things got heated. In short, it was an unpleasant scene. I looked at the one sitting next to me, and he was pulling out a gun. ‘We’re going to take you to a minefield right now,’ he said—‘your wife,’ those were his words—‘we’ll take her to those guys, the Dagestanis, the Chechens, shoot her,’ and so on. One thing led to another, and they put bags over my head and Olya’s; we were already moving by then. I have no idea where the car was going—it was probably fifteen or twenty minutes.”

The couple was taken to “some kind of courtyard.” Kapralov remembered that the courtyard was paved with tiles: the bag over his head allowed him to see his feet. “The bags were put on like this. You could see from below, you could see their shoes, and below that—the tiles.” The Kapralovs were led into a building that used to be “a psychiatric hospital or clinic.” “A dermatology clinic,” Olga corrected her husband.

Gennady Kapralov explained that the “hospital” is located on Dzerzhinsky Street (“it’s the longest street in Melitopol”) across from the “Gidromash” plant under the bridge to Novy Melitopol.

There they spent the next 95 days without a court order.

The torture

In a secret prison, operatives showed Gennady Kapralov “photos of strangers and asked for surnames that I didn’t know either. They also asked, ‘Do you know anyone who serves in the Armed Forces of Ukraine?’”

Kapralov replied that he didn’t know anyone. They threatened him: “We know where your children live, what their names are; we can bring your grandchildren here.”

“Then I realised this was going to be a long haul. People had been disappearing since 2022 and not coming back, and anything could happen. The beatings began. They were wearing balaclavas, is that what they’re called? Hats with slits in the front. And I had a bag…”—at these words, Gennady Kapralov found it hard to speak; tears welled up in his eyes, and the judge called a five-minute recess.

“I’m sorry. I lost it. When they beat me, I didn’t loose it like this,” he began after the recess.

During the interrogations, the security forces “demanded names and surnames, to identify someone, to name someone, but there were no military personnel among my acquaintances.”

“And they resorted to torture. It’s called ‘tapik.’ They applied electric shocks to different parts of my body. They knocked out my upper teeth. I slept sitting there for a month, but who cares about that now… By the way, there was a time when they tied me to a chair with duct tape and beat me on the chest. And I have heart problems. I said, ‘Can you give me some medicine?’ ‘Okay, okay,’ he said, and handed it to me, but that’s not the point.”

“There was a time when they brought in Olya, and I was already sitting there tied to a chair with duct tape, and they started beating her. She had a bag over her head, too. Well, I just screamed, ‘What are you doing, you monsters?’ They said, ‘What kind of word is that, monsters?’ Anyway, the pain was intense, terrible. I fell off the chair while tied up and broke it. They said, ‘Oh, so you break furniture too? We wasted 15 meters of duct tape on you!’ I couldn’t see Olya, but I heard her screaming, ‘Don’t hit me!’ This went on for several days in a row.”
“Then, in the room where I was alone, there was a PPE suit… I tore off a piece of rubber, made a noose on the radiator, and was already thinking—how to say it… Well, I couldn’t take it anymore. I put the noose around my neck. But after a while, a Dagestani guy who was guarding us came in, called for someone over—and they took me off the noose. I was taken to another room, where there were five or six people. They were told to keep an eye on me. And they were detainees as well.”

The secret prison was guarded by “the Dagestani guys,” who took the detainees to the bathroom. According to Kapralov’s description, the building was one-story, with “windows sealed with tar.” The operatives wore balaclavas and did not call each other by name in the presence of the detainees. One of them advised him to “confess,” saying that otherwise Kapralov would be killed—“it wouldn’t be a big loss for them.”

Once, “some guys came into the cell smelling of booze, and their automatic rifles clicked. I thought, God, who are these guys? One of them said, ‘Oh, you, with the stripes, you’re still here?’ And I was wearing a striped sweater, you know. I thought, ‘Well, that’s it.’”

Kapralov didn’t know “what day it was or what season;” he could only tell it was “kind of daytime—it was light outside.” Before the interrogations, a bag was put over his head: “Whether he was writing it down on paper or not, I didn’t see that. They asked me something—and then they beat me, they asked—and they beat me. But what could I do? I don’t know anything.”

The other detainees were also regularly “called into the torture chambers”; they “came back all wet.” “They were doused with water. When they shock a person with electricity... well, you can tell by looking at him.” Kapralov remembered a long-haul truck driver, “he was pale as a ghost”: he was stopped at a checkpoint because of a “Crimea is Ukraine” sticker under a layer of dust.

The extraction

In early September, Kapralov thought, “This is going to be a long haul.” In the meantime, the dangerous box from the cemetery was still lying near the house where his daughter and grandson lived. “If my daughter decides to replace the fence and the builders remove the stone, who knows what will happen—it might go off, or it might not.”

That’s when he told the security forces about the hiding place. Sometime between September 6th and 9th (Kapralov doesn’t remember exactly), they took him home, removed the bag from his head, and he “showed them the spot.” He didn’t see the operatives open the box—at that time, he was lying in a “minivan” parked near the gate with his hands behind his back.

“And he brings it over: ‘Was this in there?’ I say: ‘I don’t know; if you got it from there, then it was probably there.’ He held it up and said: ‘Well, there’s probably about four hundred grams here.’”

There were no witnesses present. After that, Kapralov was taken back to the “hospital” building and held there until November 24.

The filming

In the secret prison, Kapralov was not allowed to see his wife. But one day, he was led out of his cell. “And then I looked up and saw her coming. And they were leading me away. I had no idea where.”

“They told us we were going to shoot a movie,” Olga clarified.

When they were led out of the building, the couple saw the investigator and the lawyer for the first time. The Kapralovs were taken home.

“My door there was split in two parts, and one wouldn’t open. And there was a soldier there, decked out in all sorts of… a bulletproof vest and everything. And he couldn’t get through. Long story short, they broke down that door so he could get through.”

Gennady was told he had to “go through” in front of the camera. “And then he says, ‘Let’s throw a flash-bang grenade!’ And someone tells him: ‘What are you doing? There are neighbours here, houses are close by, everyone will come running…’ Anyway, they filmed us: ‘Tell us who you are, your last name, your address, lie down on the floor—this is how it’s done.’ Well, if they say so... We’re just people under their control.”

The operatives took the Kapralovs from their home to a former dormitory building (“I know the city—I did some renovations there”), where the FSB office was located. They didn’t put bags over their heads this time. At the FSB, the couple was filmed again: they were forced to introduce themselves (“I am such-and-such”) in front of a “professional camera.”

After that, they were given “a printed text with many pages” and asked to sign it. Gennady Kapralov was not wearing his glasses, could not read the document, and signed the “statement” without reading it. He does not remember whether the investigator and the lawyer who had accompanied them that day were present: there was “a young man at the computer” in the room and “one with a camera,” while the others “were walking around the offices.”

Only after being transferred to Moscow did Kapralov review the case materials and tell the investigator that “there’s a lot in there that didn’t happen: first of all, the date of the arrest and many other things that don’t match.”

“He says: ‘Well, never mind, you’ll tell the court how it really was. ‘I have plenty of cases already; there are lots of people like you in Melitopol.’ He didn’t ask for any clarifications. I think he just copied it from the papers I had signed.”

When Kapralov signed the “statement,” he and his wife were taken to the Melitopol temporary detention center and promised that they “would be fed” there.

The man recalled that even after that, he signed many documents he couldn’t read—“if you don’t want this to happen again, sign! Sign!” It wasn’t until the court was deciding on Kapralov’s pretrial detention that his lawyer brought him glasses for the first time.

“Thank God! And many thanks to him for telling the children. Our children didn’t know where we were or what had happened to us for 95 days. And he let them know. Here’s another thing: we were detained on August 21, and August 25 was our anniversary with Olya—the kids were supposed to come for the celebration. 33 years of married life. We weren’t there on the 25th. My birthday is on September 26—we weren’t there. No one knew anything. Then our granddaughter’s birthday was in October—the kids and grandkids were planning to gather for that, too. We weren’t there. And then on November 25th, the lawyer told them, and a few days later they brought me a care package.”

The confession

Gennady Kapralov did not admit guilt. “I haven’t done anyone any harm. I don’t deny the facts of the case, but I do not admit guilt as charged.”

“When the SMO came… The war. I’ll say it: war. I was outraged—and not just me, there were many others. Life was normal, steady. No one was discriminating against Russian speakers. All of that turned upside down. What is this? So I was born in 1964, 19 years after the end of World War II. I saw amputees moving around on those things, when I was little. My grandfather fought from Khalkhin Gol to Berlin. War in any form—I’m against it.”

Kapralov recalled how he repaired roofs damaged by shelling and bonded with Kurshutov over their shared rejection of Russian aggression. “I realised he was for Ukraine, and I feel the same way; I’m a citizen of Ukraine. I decided to help.”

Kapralov didn’t tell his wife about his friend’s requests: “No need to burden a woman with unnecessary questions.” He and Kurshutov didn’t discuss how or by whom the contents of the hiding place in the cemetery would be used.

Editor: Dmitry Tkachev