Variation #14
By KS Lack
Print: Variated Proof 3/5
Frame: razor wire, beet-stained wood
In January 2024, a Ukrainian official stated that over 8,000 Ukrainian soldiers and civilians (excluding children) were being held by Russia, though the actual number is likely higher.(A) Moscow rarely allows any access to prisoners by third-party monitors, nor does it permit much communication between prisoners and their family. This violates the Geneva Conventions, unlike Ukraine, which facilitates such access for Russian POWs, including allowing phone calls home. By withholding communication and information about their prisoners, Russia weaponizes its captives, attempting to sow discord and turn families of POWs against the Ukrainian government. But there is another reason for Russia refusal to comply with international law: they are attempting to conceal war crimes.
Russia has consistently resisted repatriating captives. Despite this, Ukraine has managed to coordinate 52 prisoner exchanges since the start of the full-scale invasion, freeing over 3,000 people from Russian captivity. A U.N.-backed commission has interviewed many of the former captives since 2022, releasing reports on their findings in March 2023 and 2024. Their findings are devastating. The commission has found that that torture—beatings, psychological abuse, sexual abuse, electric shocks, food and water deprivation—is “widespread and systematic”. There have also been multiple confirmed reports of executions, both of soldiers and civilians, including the Olenivka massacre, where Russian forces deliberately detonated an explosion in a prison barrack, killing over 50 captured soldiers.
Many of the detainees in Russian camps are not soldiers but civilians, which constitutes another war crime.(B) These noncombatants exist in a fraught limbo—Russia often refuses to acknowledge their existence. No one knows the true number of Ukrainian civilians detained since the invasion of Crimea, but estimates suggest there are thousands. In 2023, it was believed that Russia had set up over 100 detention centers Russia, Belarus and occupied Ukraine, with plans to build many more. As with soldiers, reports of torture are rampant among those few civilians who have escaped or been freed. As Anne Applebaum has written, it is a return to the Soviet-era gulag system. Only this time, the prison camps are specifically for Ukrainians, and the treatment of those detained is even worse.
A) For more on Russia’s kidnapping of Ukrainian children, see Variation #1.
B) For more on Ukraine’s military see Variation #16.
See below for further reading and background.
У російському полоні перебуває понад вісім тисяч українців, Deutsche Welle, 24 Jan 24.
Russian POWs get to make phone calls home. Ukrainians don’t. A growing movement wants that to change, AP News, 27 May 24.
Russia and Ukraine exchange POWs for the first time in months. Bodies of fallen are also swapped, AP News, 31 May 24.
UN Says Russia Continues to Torture, Execute Ukrainian POWs, United Nations, 26 Mar 24.
Takeaways from an investigation into deaths of over 50 Ukrainian POWs in a barracks 2 years ago, AP News, 25 Jul 24.
Thousands of Ukraine civilians are being held in Russian prisons. Russia plans to build many more, AP News, 13 Jul 23.
Russia Has a New Gulag, The Atlantic, 14 Jul 23.