MOSCOW — Have you enjoyed the first week of the 2018 World Cup? Good. Some of the games have certainly been very exciting!

Now read the words of Dmitry Pchelintsev as they appeared in MediaZona, a small independent online publication focused on police brutality and the prison system in Russia: “The man in surgical gloves cranked the DC generator with wires attached to my toes. The calves of my legs started contracting violently, I was paralyzed with pain. They threw me on the floor, pulled my underpants down and tried to attach the wires to my genitals. I clenched my teeth so hard that my mouth was full of blood and shards of broken teeth.”

Mr. Pchelintsev, a 26-year-old anti-fascist activist from the industrial town of Penza, told his lawyer about this in February — and then, he has said, he was tortured again to make him disown his statement.

He is part of what his torturers — Russia’s main intelligence agency, the F.S.B. — allege is a conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism during the World Cup to provoke “popular masses for further destabilization of the political climate in the country.” Nine young men have been charged in the case with “creating a terrorist cell.” One managed to flee the country; the others have been arrested, tortured and made to confess to being part of an underground terrorist organization called “the Network.” There’s no evidence that any such organization or plot existed.