Vladimir Putin's forces are routinely abducting and torturing Ukrainian individuals by using horrific strategies pursued by the Nazis, it has been reported.
Dmytro Orlov, the Ukrainian mayor of Enerhodar in the north-western part of Zaporizhzhia Oblast in Ukraine, said detainees were being forced into confessions about participating in or supporting resistance attacks.
Civilians were also being electrocuted, beaten, and held for weeks and sometimes months at a time.
He said Kremlin troops are demanding ransoms of 50,000 Ukrainian hryvnias (£1,400) to be paid either to the soldiers or their relatives if they wish for detainees to be released.
Mr Orlov warned that the crackdown was forcing residents to up and leave, including vital technicians needed to operate the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.
Mr Orlov said: “Hundreds of city residents are currently being held captive. People are electrocuted, beaten, and held for weeks and sometimes, months.
"They [are forced] to confess to ‘illegal activities’, in particular participation in the city’s self-defence, concealment of weapons and to name the names of other ‘accomplices’.”
Professor Alexander Motyl, a leading expert on Ukraine at Rutgers University, Newark, told The i Newspaper that the Kremlin forces were repeating the strategies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
He said coercive methods are their only way of controlling the population and Stalin once relied on crude force to the general population too.
Professor Motyl said: "The Nazis acted the same way during the Second World War, as did the Soviets. In both cases, coercion was enormous, entailing arrests, killings, deportations… Plus ça change.”
The news comes as the Ukrainian military’s Southern Operational Command also claimed that forces commanded by Russian President Vladimir Putin in Kherson and the nearby city of Mykolaiv have also begun abducting the relatives of Ukrainian soldiers.
Svetlana Zalizetskaya, the director of local newspaper Holovna Gazeta Melitopolya and news website RIA-Melitopol, told France 24 that she was intimidated by Galina Danilchenko, the pro-Russian acting mayor.
Danilchenko reportedly asked Zalizetskaya to become a propagandist for Russia, but she refused and then a few days later she found that her father had been taken hostage.
“Their demand was clear: he would be returned if I gave myself in", she told the French publication.
A senior Russian politician has also suggested they should kidnap the NATO defence minister in Ukraine and take them to Moscow.
