Ukraine has initiated war crimes proceedings against Ilya Sorokin, a Russian medical worker accused of having savagely tortured Ukrainian prisoners of war. Sorokin is not in custody, and any trial will be held in absentia, but all such proceedings are important and will, like the EU sanctions imposed earlier this year, ensure that Sorokin can be caught and brought to justice should he try to travel outside Russia.
Although Sorokin was most notorious among his victims as ‘Dr Evil’, he is not, in fact, a doctor, but a medical worker, with only basic medical training. He was employed at the ‘medical unit’ of Prison colony No. 10 in Mordovia and, judging by multiple accounts from former prisoners of war, played an extremely active role in torturing Ukrainians.
It was thanks to a major journalist investigation by Radio Svoboda’s [RFE/RL’s] Schemes Project in July 2025 that former Ukrainian prisoners of war [POW] identified Sorokin as ‘Dr Evil’, the individual who had used tasers or stun guns, applying multiple electric shocks, as a method of torture, and had refused to provide them with medical treatment.
It is not only Sorokin who is guilty of grave crimes over the treatment of Ukrainian POWs. Russia is violating international law on the treatment of prisoners of war, though its imprisonment of such POWs in penal institutions and the torture and ill-treatment to which at least 90% of the prisoners are believed to have been subjected.
In this case, the Mordovia prison colony has ‘special’ (harshest regime), with the POWs held in total isolation. According to Ukraine’s POW Coordination Headquarters, as of April 2025, there are believed to have been 700 Ukrainian prisoners illegally held in a prison colony intended for 850 men.
The Schemes journalists spoke with a number of POWs who were held at Prison Colony No. 10 from February 2023 to April 2025. The former prisoners all recounted being subjected to systematic psychological and physical ill-treatment, with ‘Dr Evil’, as they called him, coming in for particular mention. The men gave harrowing accounts of physical torture: including beatings; the use of electric shocks through tasers; bags being placed over their heads; and being set upon by the prison colony’s guard dogs. Neither these methods, nor the mock executions; deliberate beating around the genitals; threats of rape, etc., that former POWs endured, were specific to the Mordovian prison colony. What made this so shocking was the fact that one of the worst, most sadistic, torturers was the supposed medical worker they knew as ‘Dr Evil’. As well as such methods of active physical torture, he forced the men to make degrading noises (imitating animals, etc.) or to keep shouting ‘glory to Russian medicine’. Although purportedly a medical worker, he also refused to provide medical treatment, with this having, in some cases, caused the death of imprisoned Ukrainians. Among such victims was Volodymyr Yukhymenko, who had been savagely beaten the previous day, so that blood was pouring from his swollen ear, yet received no help and died.
Through both the POWs’ testimony and open sources, Schemes journalists Olha Ivlieva and Yulia Tolstiakova succeeded in identifying ‘Dr Evil’ as Ilya Anatolievich Sorokin (b. 02.08.1990)) and were also able to name some other medical workers; other employees; and the prison administration.
Although Sorokin, when called by one of the journalists, denied working at the prison colony, before hanging up on her, there seems no real room for doubt, with the former POWs all recognizing him on photographs shown. The investigation was probably instrumental in the European Union acting Sorokin to their sanctions list.
The SBU document, informing Sorokin of the charges, lists very specific allegations, undoubtedly based on testimony from former prisoners of war. Like the original investigation, they paint a terrifying picture, not only of one shocking psychopath, but of the Russian penal system which clearly allows, or even encourages, such savage brutality against Ukrainian civilian hostages and prisoners of war.
Many of the prisoners of war had been moved from one such torture prison to another, in some cases, since the first half of 2022. One of the men who recounted his experience of ‘Dr Evil’s’ torture was Oleksandr Savov, a marine involved in the defence of Azovstal in Mariupol. He spoke of his first encounter with this supposed medical worker and of how he told him that he suspected that he had tuberculosis. The ‘response’ – an electric shock from ‘Dr Evil’s’ taser gun and the demand that he shout. When Savov, bemused, asked what he was supposed to shout, he was told ‘glory to Russian medicine’, with his torturer simply inflicting more electric shocks when he did so.
Oleksandr Savoy returned home in March 2025, after almost three years in Russian captivity. Just 46, he died nine months later, almost certainly as a result of the illnesses he had contracted in Russian prisons and the systematic torture which he had endured.
