The last major prisoner exchange was in August, but Ukrainian families are getting calls from POWs held by Russia asking them to protest against the Ukrainian government.

The last major prisoner exchange was in August, but Ukrainian families are getting calls from POWs held by Russia asking them to protest against the Ukrainian government.

The last time Valentyna Tkachenko, a 35-year-old mother of two from Chernihiv in northern Ukraine, saw her husband Serhii was just before Russia invaded her country.

Serhii, a National Guard soldier, was captured on February 24 of last year, the day Moscow launched its all-out invasion of Ukraine. His unit was guarding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant when it was attacked by the Russians. When the Russian military retreated from Chernobyl and the rest of the Kyiv region at the end of March, they took Serhii and 167 other POWs with them.

Since then, the wives of the captured soldiers have only heard from them once — a short handwritten note: “I am alive, everything is OK,” sent more than six months after they were taken prisoner.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    3·
    11 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Petro Yatsenko, spokesperson for Ukraine’s coordinating staff on the treatment of prisoners of war, told POLITICO that other families have received similar calls from soldiers being held by the Russians.

    The Russian refusal to exchange POWs appears aimed at inflaming tensions in Ukrainian society, where dissatisfaction with Zelenskyy is rising in the wake of this year’s disappointing counteroffensive, and the mood is turning grim as crucial aid for Ukraine stalls in the U.S. Senate and Hungary blocks the EU’s efforts to boost civilian and military help for Kyiv.

    Ukraine has managed to exchange only a few dozen Azovstal defenders, including the commanders of the Azov Regiment, but thousands of regular troops, police and border guards captured in Mariupol are still being held.

    The International Committee of the Red Cross visits POWs on both sides of the front — so far seeing 2,300 of them — but Russia hasn’t fully opened its facilities to outside inspection and the ICRC is institutionally limited in its ability to criticize countries out of fear that its access will be cut off.

    We have also delivered more than 3,800 personal messages between POWs and their loved ones, on top of facilitating the exchanges of over 9,300 letters from and to prisoners of war,” said Achille Després, the ICRC spokesperson in Ukraine.

    “Our goal is to work directly with the detaining authorities, to influence towards the concrete improvement of the interment conditions and remind the relevant states of their legal obligations, notably that POWs must at all times be treated humanely and their rights upheld, as well as their integrity, dignity and privacy respected,” he said.

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