This month, the Ukrainian journalist Victoriia Roshchyna was finally laid to rest in a cemetery in Kyiv. She had disappeared in August 2023 while investigating abuses by Russian forces in occupied areas of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region. After more than a year in Russian custody, she was to be released as part of a prisoner swap between Kyiv and Moscow. But she died before the exchange took place. Russian authorities eventually repatriated her body, which showed signs of torture.
Last October, when news broke of Roshchyna’s death, Donald Trump was running for US president and repeatedly promising that if elected, he would end Russia’s war against Ukraine “in one day.” But the war grinds on, with Russian forces intensifying attacks across the frontline and ramping up long-range strikes on Ukrainian cities. Expectations are low that Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin today in Alaska will resolve the many important questions that the warring parties must iron out, such as security guarantees for Ukraine and the future of the occupied territories.
But the many thousands of Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) and captured civilians held in the occupied territories and in Russia proper, as well as the hundreds of Ukrainian children put up for adoption after they were deported to Russia, cannot wait for a negotiated end to the armed conflict that could take years to materialize. Nor can the scores of Russian nationals imprisoned for their antiwar stance or actions. Every day that Ukrainians and Russian political prisoners remain in custody comes with a risk that they will share Roshchyna’s fate.
Releasing war captives may be the one thing that all parties can quickly agree on. In June, Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, noted the importance of Russian-Ukrainian negotiations from a “humanitarian perspective” and spoke of the hundreds of captured Russian soldiers who were able to “return home” following a prisoner swap that Kyiv and Moscow agreed to during negotiations in Istanbul. Throughout the spring and summer, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky repeatedly declared that “bringing home” Ukrainian captives was “a top priority” for his government. Kyiv’s backers share this concern. The European Union and the Council of Europe have strongly emphasized the need for Moscow to release Ukrainian detainees. So has the United States, which, in a joint statement with Ukraine published in March, demanded that the Kremlin prioritize “the exchange of prisoners of war, the release of civilian detainees, and the return of deported Ukrainian children.” Qatar, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have all been involved in mediating prisoner swaps and in efforts to secure the repatriation of Ukrainian children.
The US administration must now emphasize the need to release and repatriate wartime detainees in its negotiations with Moscow. This is not just an idealistic goal. Because an agreement for both sides to free civilian detainees and exchange POWs is relatively low-hanging fruit in diplomacy with the Kremlin, securing it could help smooth the way for talks over more vexing issues. And in the meantime, a deal could meaningfully reduce the human suffering this war inflicts daily. It is too late to save Roshchyna, who was just 27 years old when she died in Russian detention. But thousands of war captives can still come home.
The Detained
The exact number of POWs held by Russia and Ukraine and civilian detainees held by Russia is unknown, but according to estimates by both Russian and Ukrainian officials, the number is in the thousands. In the past 12 months, hundreds of POWs have been released in exchanges. In talks in Istanbul in May, Kyiv and Moscow agreed to the first large-scale prisoner swap of the war: 1,000 from each side. (Roughly every eighth prisoner released by Russia as part of that swap turned out to be a civilian, not a combatant; detaining civilians for the purpose of exchanging them as “prisoners of war” could constitute the war crime of hostage taking.) The swap was followed by several substantial exchanges over the course of the summer, including exchanges of gravely wounded or ill POWs and exchanges of the bodies of fallen soldiers.
In a recent report, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) referenced interviews with 117 Ukrainian POWs who had returned to Ukraine in exchanges after more than two years in captivity. In most of the cases, the interviews confirmed “patterns of widespread and systematic torture and ill-treatment.” Former POWs spoke of “severe beatings, stress positions, electric shocks, dog attacks, sexual violence, prolonged standing or exhaustive exercising and humiliation.”
The report also flagged that between December 2024 and May 2025, Russian courts convicted at least 125 Ukrainian POWs on terrorism-related charges over actions that were, in fact, lawful acts of war. According to the Geneva Conventions, POWs may not be tried for merely participating in hostilities as combatants. They, like any other soldiers, can and should be prosecuted for their actions in war if those actions involve war crimes or crimes against humanity, such as acts of torture or the deliberate killing of civilians. Russian authorities, however, commonly prosecute Ukrainian POWs based on false confessions to war crimes extracted through torture.
In addition to POWs, Russia holds thousands of Ukrainian civilian detainees—more than 16,000, according to Ukraine’s human rights commissioner. Most of them were detained by Russian forces and their proxies in occupied areas of Ukraine on suspicion of providing intelligence to Ukrainian authorities, for speaking out against the occupation, or for refusing to collaborate with occupying authorities. These civilians are then either jailed in the occupied territories or deported to Russia and imprisoned there. Most are denied contact with their loved ones and access to lawyers. OHCHR documented hundreds of such cases soon after the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022. The Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, a leading Ukrainian civil society organization, has verified the identities and whereabouts of 1,863 Ukrainian civilians in Russian detention.
Russian authorities have prosecuted some detained Ukrainian civilians on terrorism, espionage, and other politically motivated charges. For example, Iryna Horobtsova, a civic activist, was detained in May 2022 by Russian authorities in Kherson when that city was under occupation. She was unlawfully transferred to occupied Crimea, given a trial that was closed to the public, convicted of espionage, and sentenced to ten years in prison. Another civilian, Iryna Kulish, a housewife in her 50s, was arrested by Russian security agents in October 2023 in the occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia region. They held her in secret detention for 20 days, and through torture and threats forced her to confess to having planned to plant an explosive device at a polling station before a referendum on the incorporation of the Zaporizhzhia region into Russia. Kulish was then deported to Russia and tried before a military court on terrorism charges. She is now serving an eight-year sentence. Kulish suffers from a medical condition that is rapidly deteriorating without adequate medical assistance. Her lawyer told Human Rights Watch this summer that she has tremors in her hands so severe that she cannot sleep at night.
Russia invents false charges because it has no legal basis to hold Ukrainian civilians in custody. These civilians should all be released and allowed to return to their homes immediately and without condition. Instead, they are unlawfully used as bargaining chips in POW exchanges and suffer inhumane treatment while in confinement. In October 2024, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine, which was established by the United Nations after Russia’s full-scale invasion to investigate alleged human rights abuses and violations of the laws of war, concluded after extensive research that the torture of Ukrainian civilians and POWs in Russian custody is widespread, systematic, and driven by coordinated state policy. It therefore constitutes a crime against humanity.
The Most Vulnerable
Among the Ukrainian civilians transferred to Russia since February 2022 are thousands of Ukrainian children—a war crime for which the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Putin and Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova. Russian authorities and their proxies took many of the children from boarding schools and care homes for children with disabilities or children in difficult family circumstances in occupied areas of Ukraine. The children were deported without their families’ consent and placed in Russian orphanages or, in some cases, handed over to foster families. Russian authorities have shared no information with Ukraine about the children’s identities or whereabouts.
After the full-scale invasion, the US State Department under President Joe Biden began funding Yale University’s Humanitarian Research Lab to track down the deported Ukrainian children. By scouring Russian adoption databases and conducting other open-source research, including satellite imagery analysis, the lab found thousands of children. It identified more than 40 Russian facilities housing deported Ukrainian children and determined the locations of more than 300 children who had been adopted.
Russian authorities insist that all the Ukrainian children brought to Russian territory were “evacuated” for their own protection from areas with active hostilities. But the laws of war prohibit a warring party from transferring children who are not its own nationals without their parents’ or guardians’ written consent, except as a temporary measure for compelling health or safety reasons. Moscow’s refusal to provide Ukrainian authorities with a list of deported children and their locations, its assignment of Russian citizenship to many deported children, and its decision to put them up for adoption clearly indicate that Russia by no means considers the evacuations temporary. In November 2022, the UN Children’s Fund raised alarms about the last practice in particular, flagging in the guidance it issued for protecting Ukrainian children that adoption “should never occur during or immediately after an emergency.”
Yale researchers also found that Ukrainian children in Russia were being indoctrinated with anti-Ukrainian propaganda in an attempt to erase their national and cultural identities and sever their ties with their home country. Teachers and orphanage workers reprimanded children who spoke Ukrainian or criticized the war. Some children were placed in military training in Russian youth camps or sent to study in Russian military academies.
In March, the Trump administration abruptly withdrew the Yale lab’s funding as part of its sweeping budget cuts. The researchers lost access to the data they had collected, as the database belonged to the US government under the terms of the contract with the lab. After a public outcry, the administration restored the lab’s funding through July 1 and allowed the lab to transfer its data to the European Union’s law enforcement agency, Europol. But researchers do not have the resources to update the database since. As the Russian state continues to relocate children and move forward with adoptions, the lab’s data may soon become obsolete—unless the Trump administration or a private institution funds the work needed to resume investigations. In June, during the talks in Istanbul, Ukrainian negotiators presented their Russian counterparts with a list of 339 kidnapped children, seeking their immediate return; accurate information will be crucial to compiling future such lists.
The final group of captives is composed of Russians who have spoken up or taken action against the war—and who have paid a high price for doing so. The list of political prisoners maintained by the Russian human rights organization Memorial currently includes 269 cases, with over a thousand additional cases under investigation. A prisoner swap among Germany, Russia, and the United States in August 2024 resulted in the release of the prominent opposition politician Vladimir Kara-Murza, the human rights defender Oleg Orlov, and a few others who had been imprisoned in Russia over their antiwar stance. But the number of prosecutions of domestic war critics keeps rising.
Rights groups such as Memorial, OVD-Info, and others have documented a pattern of ill treatment of political prisoners in Russia. The authorities arbitrarily place dissidents in solitary confinement and cells with extremely harsh conditions for alleged disciplinary violations, deny them family visits, hinder their access to lawyers, and fail to provide them with adequate medical care.
Bring Them Home
Ukraine’s leaders have made it clear that they are willing to release Russian prisoners in their custody in exchange for Ukrainian POWs and civilian detainees. The return of Russian POWs is important for the Kremlin’s own constituency, especially the families of POWs, active-duty soldiers, and members of the public who could be mobilized to serve in the armed forces. In his speeches and media comments, Putin frequently says that “Russia does not leave our own behind.”
For the Kremlin, a limited humanitarian concession would cost little and could improve relations between Moscow and Washington—a major objective for Putin. Washington should use the summit in Alaska and other channels to Moscow to help secure the release of war captives. Some of Kyiv’s European allies, such as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, have already stressed the urgency of releasing all war captives; they should encourage Trump to engage directly with Putin on this issue. Other countries that maintain working relations with Russia can bring pressure to bear, too. Qatar and the UAE are already engaged in efforts to secure the repatriation of abducted Ukrainian children, and Turkey and the UAE have acted as mediators for previous POW exchanges. They can now play bigger roles in convincing the Kremlin to release wartime detainees. Turkey in particular has a good deal of leverage with Russia, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said repeatedly, including this week, that Turkey is eager to host a meeting between Putin, Trump, and Zelensky. A call by Erdogan for the Kremlin to release war captives would be a powerful humanitarian gesture and would be well received by the Turkish president’s domestic and international audiences.
For the thousands of Ukrainian POWs and civilians in Russian custody, each passing day brings more brutality, torture, and indignity. For the thousands of Ukrainian children deported to Russia, each day in exile erodes their connection to their Ukrainian families and identity. And for imprisoned Russian war critics, each day behind bars compounds the injustice they face. The fate of Russia’s war captives is a humanitarian issue that can be resolved soon. There isn’t a moment to lose.
