The leadership of Russia’s penitentiary system removed all restrictions on the use of violence against prisoners of war in the first weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. This decision marked the beginning of years of systematic torture of Ukrainian captives in Russian prisons.

New reporting from The Wall Street Journal details how Igor Potapenko, the head of Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad region, ordered guards to subject Ukrainian prisoners of war to particularly brutal treatment from the very first weeks of the full-scale invasion.

In the early weeks of the war, prison authorities told top guards there would be no restrictions against violence.

A few weeks after the invasion of Ukraine began, the leadership of the prison service in Russia issued recommendations regarding the treatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war. The head of the Federal Penitentiary Service in St.