Marc Bennetts
October 29, 2026
The Times
When Serhii Doroshenko, a Ukrainian military doctor, arrived in a prison in central Russia, he had already been beaten and tortured on many occasions since being taken captive by President Putin’s forces.
But on his first day at penal facility No 10 in Mordovia, Doroshenko was confronted by a man known by Ukrainian prisoners of war as Doctor Evil, a man who has emerged as one of the most notorious figures in Russia’s modern-day gulag. “He was at our intake. There were 30 of us, all naked, in a room. He asked who had asthma, tuberculosis, or anything else. But if, God forbid, you mentioned any illness, then he would torture you personally, on top of the torture from the prison staff, because you were making extra work for him,” said Doroshenko, who was captured during the battle for Mariupol in 2022 and spent more than 1,000 days in Russian captivity before his release last year in a PoW exchange. “He kicked us and hit us with a baton and a stun gun. He knows where it hurts the most, and he deliberately strikes you right there,” he told The Times from the hospital where he is still recovering from his injuries.
A former paediatrician, Doroshenko was chief medical officer of Mariupol’s territorial defence battalion during the battle for the Ukrainian port city. Ukrainian medical personnel in captivity were subject to extra-harsh treatment because they were believed by their captors to have carried out medical experiments on Russian troops, he said. “This myth was spread by Russian propaganda,” Doroshenko said. “They told us that in Mariupol medics ran some biological experiments on Russian soldiers and colonels. That they had cut off their testicles. This is bullshit, of course, but we got beaten for this just as much as artillerymen and snipers.”
Doctor Evil, who was identified by the RFE/RL website as Ilya Sorokin, 35, has been charged in absentia by Ukraine’s SBU security service with torturing at least 29 Ukrainian PoWs. The European Union has imposed sanctions on Sorokin, citing his “inhumane and degrading treatment” of prisoners. Sorokin has denied the allegations. “You can’t call him a human being. He started to wave the stun gun around and shocked me several times,” Pavlo Afisov, a Ukrainian marine infantry officer who was also captured in Mariupol, told RFE/RL. “He said we were ‘stinking khokhly’ who did not deserve decent treatment,” he added, referring to the derogatory Russian term for Ukrainians.
Other former Ukrainian PoWs have accused Sorokin of a litany of abuse, including shocking them with a stun gun if they failed to shout “Glory to Russian medicine!” or if they asked for help for heart pains, festering wounds on their legs, bleeding and toothache.
Also known as Dr Shocker, Sorokin wore a medical mask and sometimes a balaclava decorated with a skull, former PoWs said. Although some caught glances at his face, Doroshenko said he and fellow inmates were forced to address Sorokin with their heads down and their hands behind their backs. “To raise your face was to die, or to receive so many blows that you might not survive,” he said.
Sorokin is far from the only Russian medic accused of torturing Ukrainian PoWs. A new report called The Anatomy of Torture by the Kyiv-based Centre for Civil Liberties, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, is based on the testimonies of hundreds of Ukrainian prisoners who witnessed Russian medical professionals “directly participating in torture, ill treatment, and the degrading treatment of detainees”.
Oleg Martynenko, one of the authors of the report, said that the abuse was probably “the result of a deliberate state policy, rather than a collection of isolated misconduct on the part of doctors”.
Besides beatings and electrocution, Ukrainian PoWs have been subject to rape, castration and coerced sexual acts, according to a report by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe. It also said they had been deliberately exposed to contagious diseases such as tuberculosis.
Other Russian medics have been accused of ignoring requests to assist Ukrainian PoWs suffering from epileptic fits, severe diarrhoea and high fevers, among other complaints. Under the Geneva Conventions, detaining powers must provide adequate medical care.
One Ukrainian former PoW who was also held in Mordovia told the Centre for Civil Liberties: “An officer in my cell had coxarthrosis, a hip joint disease. He could not stand upright for long. He needed to support himself somehow because his leg couldn’t hold him. He would come out with us for a morning check-up, and the medical staff would apply the taser to the same joint that was hurting, helping him ‘forget’ the pain quickly.”
There were some exceptions, Doroshenko said. “There were nurses and doctors who came and really did try to help us. They gladly left us the leftover supplies: wipes, iodine, and so on. But it was a lottery: you could ask for treatment and get beaten with stun guns until you pissed and shit yourself. Or you could ask and they’d give you a couple of pills.”
Even on the occasions that medical assistance was provided, it was sometimes accompanied by torture. Andrii Pereverziev, a serviceman from Ukraine’s 79th Air Assault Brigade, was branded with the words “Glory to Russia!” after being operated on in Russian custody for his injuries. He said a nurse told him: “Don’t worry, when you’re back home, you can cover it up with a tattoo or something.”
Doroshenko faces a long road back to anything resembling his previous life. His home in Mariupol has been destroyed, and he has lost all feeling in his face, arm and shoulder. He has also been unable to free himself of the fear of hunger, after years of near-starvation prison
rations. “If there’s no food and water in my backpack, I feel like something’s missing. I can’t leave leftovers on a plate. Because I remember how for three years, I ate nothing,” he said.
His experiences mean he has no plans to return to work as a practising doctor when he has recovered. “Patients would be too heavy a load for me,” he said. “I couldn’t bear their pain.”
Additional reporting by Kateryna Malofieieva.
Marc Bennetts has been covering Russia and the former Soviet Union for The Times and The Sunday Times since 2015. He reported from all across Russia, from Chechnya to deepest Siberia and lived in the country for 25 years. He left Russia in 2022 after the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He has since made more than a dozen trips to wartime Ukraine. He has also reported from Greenland, Iran, Israel and North Korea, among other countries. He is the author of two previous books about Russia: I’m Going to Ruin Their Lives, about the Kremlin’s crackdown on the opposition, and Football Dynamo, about Russian football culture. His new book, The Descent: Witnessing Russia’s Spiral Into Madness Under Putin, will be published by Bloomsbury in February 2026.