“severe beatings or other serious abuse”.
“Accounts of detainee torture are as commonplace as they are shocking,” Amnesty’s Europe and Central Asia Programme director John Dalhuisen said.
“Prisoners on both sides have been beaten and subjected to mock executions,” said Dalhuisen. “We have also documented summary killings of those held by separatist groups. It is a war crime to torture or deliberately kill captives taken during conflict.”
Ukraine’s National Security Service said it was “open for dialogue” and ready to meet Amnesty representatives in order to improve the rights record of its troops.
Amnesty said it had identified three recent cases in which the rebels executed at least eight pro-Kiev fighters.
“Most of the worst abuses take place in informal places of detention.
This typically occurs during the initial days of captivity, and groups outside the official or de facto chain of command tend to be especially violent and lawless,” the report said.
One reported episode involved a Ukrainian soldier who was wounded during Kiev’s failed defence of the highly-contested airport sprawled on the outskirts of the rebels’ de facto capital Donetsk.
Insurgents blew up the hub on January 20 and ordered surviving members of the government contingent to load themselves onto rebel trucks. A 34-year-old soldier named Andriy Gavrilyuk had his legs crushed during the explosion and could not properly move.
“There were no stretchers, no nothing, so they couldn’t carry him (Gavrilyuk) up. Seconds later I heard three shots,” a fellow soldier told Amnesty.
The report said a video from the airport posted on YouTube four days later showed Gavrilyuk lying dead with “a clear gunshot wound to the middle of his forehead”.
Russia casts the pro-EU uprising in Ukraine that last year ousted a Moscow-backed president and sparked the current war as having been led by armed “fascists” from the Pravy Sektor (Right Sector) paramilitary group.
Amnesty said “Right Sector members systematically extorted money from people in their custody and collected ransoms from the prisoners’ relatives.”
Its research discovered that the far-right fighters crammed prisoners into an overcrowded basement cell near the peaceful government-controlled city of Dnipropetrovsk.
“People had to use plastic bags to collect their urine and excrement, and they had no means of washing or showering. Some prisoners were brought outside to work; others remained inside all of the time,” the report said. The “evidence appears credible and merits a full criminal investigation,” the report concluded.