In a northern Ukrainian prison, young Russian conscripts captured during Ukraine’s incursion into Russian territory await their fate. Ukraine sees them as crucial bargaining chips, while their families back in Russia are demanding their swift return.
In an undisclosed prison in northern Ukraine’s Sumy region, an area that borders Russia along its Kursk region and a small portion of its Belgorod region, Russian prisoners of war are being held captive.
The men are mostly young, mostly inexperienced and were mostly surprised to find themselves caught in the firing lines of a Ukrainian attack on Russian territory that began two weeks ago.
“They are between 18 and 20 years old,” said FRANCE 24 correspondent Gulliver Cragg, who was granted a chance to visit the prison by the Ukrainian ministry of defence on Tuesday. “We saw them being fed. They did not seem to be in ill health, [though] some had injuries,” he reported. But in general, Cragg said he witnessed “reasonably good relations” with the Ukrainian guards who are holding them.
One Ukrainian guard he spoke to was joking around with a Russian prisoner about his injuries. “Then, rather seriously, he said that he really considered these people to be enemy combatants and that they bear responsibility for what they did,” Cragg recounted. “But [he said] you can’t live without a joke and that you have to respect the Geneva Convention, which clearly states you should treat people in your custody as human beings.”
Kyiv launched a surprise incursion into the Russian Kursk region on August 6, the largest offensive by a foreign army on Russian soil since World War II. President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that Ukraine has since taken control of more than 1,250 square kilometres and 92 settlements in the region.
Vehemently condemned by Moscow, the incursion has been defended by Kyiv, saying its aim was to create a “buffer zone” in Russia so it could protect its own population from strikes. Ukrainian officials also said it was a way to force Russia’s hand to negotiate on “fair” terms.
By capturing territories and soldiers from the other side, Ukraine says it is replenishing its “exchange fund” – implying these prisoners could be swapped for their Russian counterparts down the line.
The detention facility visited by Cragg has processed “hundreds” of prisoners of war so far, the majority of whom are conscripts – young Russian soldiers who are a particularly precious asset in Ukraine’s “exchange fund”. Promises made and broken by Vladimir Putin that these men would not take part in active combat mean conscription service is already a thorny issue in Russia – one that Ukraine is now leveraging in its favour.
Young, ‘scared’ and unprepared
Russian military units fighting on the front lines of the war and deployed to Ukraine are mostly contract soldiers, volunteers, mercenaries and convicts who agree to bear the brunt of war in exchange for their freedom, should they survive. Whether spread too thin in terms of manpower or simply miscalculating the risk of an incursion, Russia decided to deploy conscripts to guard its border regions.
Some of these conscripts were stationed far from home, but many are locals from the Kursk or Belgorod regions bordering Ukraine. “We have seen a lot of POWs specifically from the 488th motorized rifle regiment that is part of the … Moscow military district stationed in that area. A lot of them are native to the border areas,” said Kateryna Stepanenko, Russia deputy team lead and analyst at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a US think tank providing independent research on defence and foreign affairs issues.
Though Putin had promised in March 2022 that conscripted soldiers would not be used in Ukraine, anger quickly grew among military mothers and wives when widespread reports of conscripts dying or being dispatched to the front came out a few months after Russia began its invasion.
Then under Putin’s January 2023 decree, the maximum age limit for compulsory military service was raised from 27 to 30. And in December 2023, he passed a bill allowing conscripts to serve in the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), which is responsible for border security. “Conscripts are essentially dead [weight],” Stepanenko explained. “So the best thing [for Russia] to do was send them to the border and hope that nothing happens.”
But something did. And now the anger felt by families of Russian conscripts is coming to a boiling point as they hear of their loved ones being taken to Ukrainian prisons.
Read moreUkraine’s Russia incursion gamble leaves enemy in shock, allies guessing
On the day Ukraine began its incursion, a petition was launched by family members of Russian POWs pleading for Putin to exchange soldiers as soon as possible. It has garnered over 10,000 signatures to date. “Save the lives of soldiers who are not prepared for military action,” the petition description reads in Russian. “You promised parents that they would not participate in hostilities!”
More than 100 Russian soldiers were captured last Wednesday alone, according to top Ukrainian military chief Oleksandr Syrsky. Following statements made by Ukrainian officials, Stepanenko at the ISW said that “a little over 2,000” had been captured during the first week of the incursion between August 6 and August 14.
“The data may have changed since, but it is a significant number of POWs,” Stepanenko said. Some of the coordination centres set up by Ukraine to address humanitarian issues, she said, have “reported 200 at one location” with “around 80 percent of the group” identifying as conscripts.
Most Russian conscripts stationed along the border are not seasoned fighters. They are young men fulfilling their mandatory military service, which is meant to last one year. They generally carry out menial tasks and are rarely equipped with advanced weapons. At most, “some sort of gun”, according to Stepanenko. They receive one to two months of basic training, followed by three to six of more advanced preparation. According to Russian law, those with less than four months of training should not be deployed to combat – but this can be superseded by martial law or a general mobilisation.
And when they were confronted with Ukraine’s surprise attack, many described surrendering or abandoning their posts. “None of the young [prisoners] talked about putting up a fight once they came into contact with Ukrainian troops,” Cragg said after visiting the Sumy prison. But he said “most of them had some story about coming under [artillery] fire before … surrendering”.
As troop numbers falter and the war grinds on, most Russian conscripts do not receive even the necessary basic training. “Officers that would be responsible for training conscripts in peacetime have been sent to support combat operations, so there is a bottleneck in terms of training, which is probably contributing to the fact that a lot of them are surrendering. They simply don’t know how to operate weapons.”
Personnel in the Kursk region were also most likely fresh recruits who began their service just over four months ago, many of them starting in April during the first of two conscription cycles that take place in Russia each year.
“They are likely scared,” Stepanenko said.
More than bargaining chips
The hope for Ukraine are that these young soldiers will be used as bargaining chips to negotiate a new prisoner exchange. “Overall, this [Kursk] operation became our largest investment in the process of freeing Ukrainian men and women from Russian captivity,” Zelensky told diplomats on Monday, according to a statement published on Telegram late in the day. “We have already captured the largest number of Russian prisoners ever in one operation.”
But opening the prison in which they are held to journalists and members of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is also a way for Ukraine to show the international community that it is treating these prisoners humanely. “Kyiv is quite keen on showing … that it is taking those prisoners and treating them according to international law, something that Russia has failed to do with Ukrainian prisoners,” FRANCE 24 correspondent Emmanuelle Chaze said in an August 15 report.
Prisoner exchanges have happened sporadically since the war began in February 2022. In the span of two years, thousands of POWs have been freed in more than 50 individual exchanges. The last major swap took place in July, when 190 soldiers held captive on either side were freed following negotiations mediated by the United Arab Emirates.
When prisoner-swap negotiations stall, accusations are fired from both sides. Russian news agency TASS in May quoted the country’s human rights commissioner, Tatyana Moskalova, as putting the blame on “false demands” from Kyiv to explain a several-month-long suspension of exchanges, for example. Ukrainian human rights commissioner Dmytro Lubinets in November 2023 shifted the blame in saying the “exchanges don’t happen because Russia doesn’t want them to”.
Stepanenko underlined the importance of these accusations, especially on the Russian side, in explaining the deeper political undercurrents behind Ukraine’s decision to capture large numbers of Russian soldiers. “Before [the Kursk incursion], the Kremlin was undertaking an information operation aimed at destroying Ukrainian belief in the Ukrainian government and in Zelensky,” she said. “[The Kremlin] would deny POW exchanges … and put out information online claiming the Ukrainian government does not care about POWs or that it is abandoning its people.”
“Exchanges are a way to destabilise society because if people are demanding the government return prisoners and the government is unable to do that … it can have devastating impacts,” she added, pointing to Ukraine’s decision to turn that belief on its head by growing its “exchange fund”.
Perhaps even more crucially, “conscripts are the most vulnerable part of the Russian military that can actually have some ramifications on Putin’s ability to sustain his regime”, Stepanenko said. The practice of deploying less-trained soldiers alongside combat professionals has been highly unpopular throughout Russian history. Scores of young conscripts killed during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and during the Chechen wars sparked significant public outcry and resentment back home.
“For Putin, this is a very vulnerable group of people that he needs to return back to Russia,” she said, noting that Putin is taking the risk of upsetting mothers and whole families who will blame him for the death or imprisonment of these conscripts whom the government promised would not be touched.
“So this is actually Ukrainian regaining the initiative in the POW-exchange world – forcing Russians to respond,” Stepanenko said.
Russia on Monday said it would not participate in peace talks following the incursion by Ukraine, with Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov saying to enter into negotiations now would be “completely inappropriate”. But Ukrainian rights commissioner Lubinets said last week he has been discussing the Russian prisoners with his counterpart in Moscow, claiming it was the first time Russia had initiated contact with a view to a POW swap.
Marines from the Russian Army were reported to have captured a group of 19 Ukrainian soldiers in the Kursk region, state RIA news agency said on Monday.
While both sides continue to wrestle over prisoner exchange negotiations, the families of captives held in Ukraine and Russia hold their breaths.
As for the young Russian conscripts being held in Ukrainian prisons, the hope for a way out is clear. “They all said they wanted to be exchanged as soon as possible,” Cragg said after his visit to Sumy prison.
