A group of captured Russian soldiers lining up at a prison in western Ukraine on April 18, 2023. Getty Images
Published December 1, 2023
- Russia has stopped prisoner of war swaps since August, a Ukrainian official said.
- It wants Ukrainian families to think their country has left loved ones behind, Dmytro Lubinets said.
- Ukraine will “fight” to bring back every single one of them, the human rights ombudsman said.
Russia has stopped exchanging prisoners of war with Ukraine because it wants Ukrainian families to think their country is not doing anything to bring their loved ones back home, an official said.
Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, made the claim in a Telegram post on Thursday.
He said Russia is refusing to swap POWs so “relatives of the defenders believe that the Ukrainian authorities aren’t doing anything to return the soldiers,” per a translation provided by the Kyiv Post.
However, he added that Ukraine will not let their POWs down and will “fight” for every single one of them, according to the outlet’s translation.
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SOURCE: www.businessinsider.com
RELATED: Russian POWs Describe ‘Nightmare’ of Combat in Ukraine
Soldiers captured by Ukrainian troops in the battle for Avdiivka tell of the high price their army is incurring for its grinding advance
Sergei says his army training consisted mostly of menial chores, such as picking up branches.
Published November 30, 2023
As snow fell silently in a secret location in eastern Ukraine, the Russian infantrymen huddled on a garage floor, their hands dirty and their faces exhausted.
The men had been captured by Ukrainian troops during intense fighting for the city of Avdiivka. Now they waited to be sent to prisoner-of-war facilities, far from the front line.
Moscow’s fall offensive on Ukraine, of which Avdiivka is the primary target, is resulting in a steady flow of Russian POWs. Often, the captured men say they got lost and ended up among Ukrainians by mistake. Voluntary surrender is a crime in Russia.
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SOURCE: www.wsj.com
RELATED: ‘I want to go home’: Inside a Russian prisoner of war camp in Ukraine
Russian prisoners of war line up before dinner at a POW camp in Western Ukraine in late September 2023. (Photo by Alexander Khrebet/ The Kyiv Independent)
Published October 9, 2023
Undisclosed location in Western Ukraine – Private Alexey Strelkov massages his knee as he sits on a bed in the infirmary at a prisoner of war camp in western Ukraine, hundreds of miles away from the front line.
The former Russian inmate, who was an assault infantryman of Russia’s 61st Naval Infantry Brigade before being captured, spends his time at the camp reading pulp fiction and hoping to be swapped in a prisoner exchange.
Strelkov had six years left to serve in a Russian prison in Perm Krai northeast of Moscow for drug dealing when a Russian army colonel arrived in May with a tempting offer: a pardon in exchange for six months of service, good pay, and generous benefits for his family in the event he died on the battlefield in Ukraine.
The Russian Defense Ministry began recruiting inmates for the war in Ukraine in early 2023 after the ministry itself stopped allowing the infamous Wagner Group to recruit in Russian prisons.
Roughly a week after being recruited, Strelkov took his first-ever flight, landed in Rostov with other recruits, and headed to Russian-occupied Kherson Oblast for a short stop of military training before deployment on the Berdiansk axis, one sector where Ukraine has found moderate success during the counteroffensive.
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SOURCE: www.kyivindependent.com
