I am not going to dismiss this story out of hand, and it is a pretty serious accusation, so somebody will have to explain the downvotes lest we be accused of “supporting torture”. That being said, my problem with publications like these is that they are very probably reporting these accusations in ill‐faith; with the intention of further turning public opinion against their rulers’ current enemy, when the publication itself mentions that

“Unfortunately, we’ve found there is torture and ill-treatment of prisoners of war happening on both sides,” says Matilda Bogner, head of the UN’s Ukraine-based monitoring team.

Yefremov’s accusations may indeed be true (or partly true), but aside from this being a story that’s already easy to find and access elsewhere, it’s very probably something that the establishment published with the intention of emotionally manipulating the audience, rather than describing the situation neutrally. I suspect that those are the reasons that a few of us are annoyed to see this here.

Also, something that I found rather strange:

“After 10 years of service I was denounced as a traitor, a defector, just because I didn’t want to kill people,” he says.

While it doesn’t disprove anything, it’s nevertheless an odd thing for him to say.