About 1,500 Ukrainians held in Russia and occupied Ukraine are facing criminal prosecution even though the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has never confirmed them as prisoners, Petro Yatsenko, representative of Ukraine's Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, said on 19 October at an event on missing persons at UN headquarters in New York. The event was organized by the permanent missions of Ukraine and Poland to the UN.

Without ICRC confirmation, there is no official record that a person is alive or held, which leaves captives without proper protection, the headquarters said. Amnesty International calls this enforced disappearance, a practice that puts people outside the protection of the law. The ICRC itself has been shut out. Under the Geneva Conventions it is supposed to visit prisoners of war, but on 18 September it told Reuters that Russia has given it no access to Ukrainian POWs since 2024. UN investigators have gathered evidence of systematic torture in the detention centers where they are held. Russia denies torturing or mistreating POWs.

Families lose track of captives as Russia moves them between prisons

Kateryna Nazarii, who coordinates families of the 24th Mechanized Brigade, is the wife of a Ukrainian serviceman held by Russia. The ICRC has not been able to confirm his status as a prisoner of war. Russia does not let the ICRC or other humanitarian organizations into the prisons where Ukrainians are held, and does not hand over complete lists of prisoners, Nazarii said at the event. When families do find out where a relative is held, she said, that person is moved to another prison, and contact is lost again.

Many of those whose captivity Russia has not confirmed are civilians. Among them, Yatsenko said, are about 200 young people born after 2000 and nearly 400 people over 60. None of them has been confirmed through the ICRC, according to the headquarters.

Secrecy and torture in Russian captivity

Most Ukrainian POWs are cut off from the outside world. In a March 2025 report, Amnesty International found that 24 of the 43 families of confirmed POWs it interviewed had received no word at all from their relative. Counting prisoners allowed only one brief call or text at the start of captivity, 72% of those 43 were held incommunicado. The UN monitoring mission found that only 21 of 174 former POWs it interviewed had been able to correspond with their families, Amnesty noted.

Silence is what makes the abuse possible, Amnesty argues. The UN monitoring mission found that 97% of former POWs it interviewed had been tortured or ill-treated, the report notes, and methods include beatings, electric shocks, burns, and sexual violence. A UN commission of inquiry concluded in 2024 that the torture amounted to a "coordinated state policy," the report adds.

When the Red Cross did get in, it saw what Russia chose to show. An OSCE expert mission reported in September 2025 that, according to former prisoners, Russian staff presented only prisoners in relatively good physical condition during ICRC visits and kept the sick and tortured out of sight. The experts also found that Russia blocked visits to some facilities and gave incomplete prisoner lists.

The unconfirmed are not a small group. A quarter of the 3,767 POWs who returned to Ukraine by November 2024 had never been confirmed by Russia as captives, the Coordination Headquarters said, as cited by Amnesty. Hundreds or possibly thousands more may still be held without Russia notifying the ICRC, Amnesty concluded.

Those who come back describe the conditions. Anatolii Zemlianyi, a soldier of the 2nd Assault Brigade released in the May 2025 exchange, told Frontliner that he spent eight months in a hospital in occupied Donetsk with a grenade wound in his leg and got no proper treatment. In captivity, he said, prisoners drank water from puddles.

Russia continues to hold Ukrainian civilians unlawfully

Nobody knows how many Ukrainian civilians Russia holds. "It is not known," the UN human rights office said in a September 2025 report, which cites Ukraine's Prosecutor General's Office as having identified 15,250 civilians detained by Russia between February 2022 and August 2025. Exchanges bring very few of them back: of 5,941 people released from Russian captivity between February 2022 and 14 August 2025, 352 were civilians, Ukraine's human rights commissioner Dmytro Lubinets told The Week.

Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, an occupying power may intern civilians only for imperative reasons of security, and only under a regular procedure with periodic review, the same UN report notes. Russia instead treats detained civilians as criminals, Oleksandr Kononenko, a representative of Ukraine's human rights commissioner, told relatives of civilian hostages in 2023.

"This convention clearly states that civilian hostages should not be detained. They should be released. What is Russia doing? It 'makes all these people criminals' and accuses them of terrorism, opposition to a special military operation, and assistance to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, which is completely absurd from the point of view of an independent state and those people who are patriots of their state," Kononenko said.

Kyiv believes Russia detains civilians partly to trade them. Regular civilian swaps risk signaling to Russia that by detaining more Ukrainians it could get more Russians released, so it may seize more people to replenish its "exchange fund," Lubinets said. Ukraine therefore demands that civilians be released unconditionally. Amnesty sees a second motive. It concluded that Russia has long used arbitrary arrest, torture, and enforced disappearance to intimidate civilians in areas it controls.