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.

The US condemned the genocide and military rule there, but now that Trump craves its rare earths, that’s all changed. For democracy activists, that’s a disaster

Marco Rubio was once adamant that the US had to do everything in its power to end what he described as the “ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya in Myanmar. In a 2017 letter he signed along with 20 other US senators, Rubio called for “strong multilateral sanctions against specific senior Burmese military officials associated with the gross human rights abuses”. Those responsible for the atrocities should be prosecuted, he argued.

In the years since, the Myanmar military’s crimes have only increased. What was then deemed ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya is now widely viewed, including by the US, as genocide. What little democracy existed in Myanmar was eradicated in 2021 when Aung San Suu Kyi was arrested and imprisoned and her party’s election victory overturned, and the military took full control.

Hungary stopped a Ukrainian Oschadbank armored convoy in 2026, held its couriers, and kept $82 million in cash and gold. The European Court of Human Rights has registered six applications from the bank's couriers, who say Hungarian police unlawfully detained and tortured them.

In March, Hungarian forces stopped two bank vehicles carrying cash and bank metals from Austria to Ukraine, with seven employees transporting $40 million, 35 million euros, and nine kilograms of gold. It happened just before Hungary’s parliamentary elections, in which then-prime minister Viktor Orban had built his campaign around a sweeping anti-Ukraine message, and lost.

Six of the employees filed with the court on 5 July 2026, and the court’s secretariat has now confirmed their registration and assigned each an official number, according to the bank. It expects a seventh courier’s application, alleging the same violations, to be registered too.

“The fact that the ECHR has accepted the complaint and opened proceedings indicates that there are reasonable legal grounds for the case, that it has legal merit, and that the court intends to examine it on its merits,” Oschadbank says.

The rights the couriers say Hungary broke

The complaints rest on two articles of the European Convention on Human Rights. Article 3 bans torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, while Article 5 guarantees the right to liberty and protects people from arbitrary detention, the bank notes.

During the detention, one courier, a diabetic former Security Service officer, was forcibly injected with an unknown substance, which his Hungarian lawyer confirmed he received despite his objections. He then suffered a hypertensive crisis, lost consciousness and was hospitalized, and Oschadbank confirmed that medical care came only after he passed out, The Guardian reported.

Oschadbank calls the registration an important step in defending its staff. Board chairman Yury Katsion said the bank will continue to protect the couriers’ interests and its own reputation, expects a legal assessment of the Hungarian forces’ actions and is grateful to partners for their support.

Why registration is a start, not a verdict

The cases are only at an early stage. Registration does not mean the court has found a violation or ruled the complaints admissible, as it must separately weigh the procedural conditions and the circumstances the applicants describe, Oschadbank stresses.

The incident itself, however, is documented: Hungary returned the seven couriers the next day but held the cash and gold for months, releasing the vehicles on 12 March and the money and gold by May.

Alya: You say that Russia’s forcible transfer of Ukrainian children is the crime of genocide. In international law, genocide is defined by Article 6 of the Rome Statute. What would it take to change this legal framework to include the deportation and militarization of Ukrainian children? And is the Office of the Prosecutor in any position to do that work under current US sanctions and Karim Khan’s leave?

Kateryna: We don’t need to change any legal frameworks to prosecute what the Russians are doing with Ukrainian children. Militarization and political indoctrination, as well as Russification of young Ukrainians, is a part of Russia’s bigger strategy to destroy Ukraine as a sovereign state and to subjugate everything in the Ukrainian nation to the Russian influence and control. I don’t see legal problems; we simply still lack the political will to call the crimes by their proper names.

The UN’s 1948 Genocide Convention posits that all states that signed the convention, 154 as of today, should act to stop it—not only those affected by genocide. If the international community recognized what the Russians are doing as a crime of genocide, it would mean that yet another time in history the international community was not able to prevent genocide, to recognize some early warnings, to react properly to what the Russians did, for example, in occupied Crimea or Donbas before 2022. It is not easy, and the international community and world political leaders should be mature enough to face all these challenges, recognize that they were involved in the commission of these crimes through silence and inaction, and finally stop it.

So that is why, according to the Rome Statute, the Office of the Prosecutor can start an investigation of the crime of genocide in the Ukrainian context. It is possible: the ICC’s Ukraine-situation investigation in March 2022, supported by 43 states, included not only war crimes and crimes against humanity, but also the crime of genocide. So we have all the legal tools and means, but politically it is very difficult.

Recently, there has been a global shift towards this—in the context of the war between Arabian states and Israel, not Ukraine. But for example, Israel’s attacks against Gaza’s education have already been termed "scholasticide," so as a part of the genocidal intent, as a part of the crime of genocide. So for us lawyers and human rights defenders, this is the task—to push the international community to do the same with Russia. It is not easy because Russia is one of the five "world policemen" expected to maintain this international legal order.

I believe that, perhaps in decades, but we will see how Russia’s actions will be recognized as the crime of genocide. The forcible transfer of children from one group to another group is the fifth universally recognized element of the crime of genocide.

Alya: Your organization was involved in documenting this. How does this pipeline actually work?

Kateryna: Yes, let's take Olga Druzhinina, who fostered four children from the occupied territories of Ukraine. Her story is very interesting: first, it seemed that she could be just an ordinary Russian brainwashed by TV shows about children from Donbas. But then we found that Olga is very close to [former Russian President] Medvedev, and through Medvedev to President Putin. Olga is the head of one non-governmental organization, "Semia Arktiki" [Family of the Arctic], and this organization aims to find foster parents for orphans— now including orphans from occupied territories of Ukraine. The co-head of this organization also fostered Ukrainian children.

It is a very well-built, pre-planned architecture of people involved in the commission of this crime—not some sporadic reaction to the full-scale invasion. They planned to do it. And I will not be surprised if, in the future, we find that these families also adopted children from Crimea or from Donbas even before 2022.

Her husband is a veteran of the Russian Armed Forces. He participated in many wars of the Russian regime, including the wars in Chechnya. It was clearly against the child's best interest to be sent to the family of this Russian serviceman and his wife. So their case was widely publicized. We recorded many different details. Later, we found photos of these children in the "Warrior Center" camp in Novosibirsk, and her foster daughter from occupied Ukraine wearing a St.George’s [Russian imperial] ribbon and in military uniform.

So the Ukrainian identity of these children was completely eradicated. It was prohibited to mention that they were Ukrainians, and the main goal of this family was to repress their unloyalty to the Russian state, to re-educate them, mold them into Russian patriots. Unfortunately, I don’t know the fate of these teenagers from Mariupol, but as far as I know, they were not returned to Ukraine. And now they are already young adults—meaning they will soon be conscripted into the Russian army. They have this military duty because they were forcibly given Russian citizenship. And young children also remain under the control of Olga and his husband.

Olga and her husband are members of the so-called "Putin Team." They were recognized many times as the best family of the Yamalo-Nenets region. The governor of Yamal-Nenets is also Putin's person. His candidacy was supported by Putin for re-election to this position. And this governor has many times mentioned that Ukrainian children from the occupied territories of Ukraine were accepted by foster families from his region, even without the proper documents.

It is very difficult to influence their behavior without sanctions. In this sphere of foster care, the balance between placing children in Russian institutions and Russian families is hard to find. Russia presents only two options for the forcibly transferred Ukrainian children: Russian boarding institutions or Russian foster families. And of course, ordinary people think: a family is better than a boarding institution. The truth is that there is a third option: just return these children to Ukraine, to their homes.

And I would like to highlight that, according to the order of Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, these children from institutions will not be returned to boarding institutions in Ukraine. They will inevitably be placed with a foster family, and they can participate in choosing this family or changing it. Ukraine is doing its best to guarantee that its actions comply with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, but unfortunately, Russians are very hard to persuade to return these orphanage children.

Alya: On 11 May 2026, the EU Council sanctioned 16 individuals and seven entities for the systematic unlawful deportation, forced transfer, and forced assimilation of Ukrainian children, including through indoctrination and militarized education. Your organization pushed for these sanctions. Are they working?

Kateryna: In January–February 2026, we criticized the European Union’s sanctions policy. New persons were being added to lists, but we found that the level of coordination and harmonization of sanctions policies was only 5%. Only 13 individuals and three organizations were under sanctions in all jurisdictions analyzed by us: Ukraine, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, the European Union, Switzerland, and Japan. It was terrifying because sanctions exist, yet they are riddled by many loopholes and are actually inefficient.

That is why we started persuading them to do something with this system. And on 11 May, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union synchronized their sanctions packages: the people are included in all jurisdictions. For us, this is a big achievement.

Another achievement: a shift in their perception of where this vertical of guilty persons ends. Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova—okay; ministers, children's rights ombudspersons at the regional level, heads of the occupation authorities—okay. But what about the "ordinary" Russian people who fostered poor Ukrainian children and now contribute to their militarization? The 11 May sanctions saw the United Kingdom and Canada listing ordinary Russians, like the family from Yamalo-Nenets that fostered four Ukrainian children, including teenagers from Mariupol, and then sent them to re-education camps of the "Center Warrior" to be militarized as Russian soldiers.

If these results of our work seem small, we must remember that for the Russians, it is a very sensitive issue. They are mad because of the sanctions—and this was visible when the “Yolochka” boarding institution in occupied Crimea’s Simferopol, called a “concentration camp” by ordinary Russians, was sanctioned. Already in December 2014 [after Russia’s occupation of east Ukraine], the first Ukrainian orphans were sent to Russian foster families from this “Yolochka.” 12 years later, children from Kherson boarding institutions also went through “Yolochka.”

Alya: You've documented over 20,500 deported children. How many of that cohort are approaching Russian conscription age?

Kateryna: It is hard to tell because the way the Ukrainian side is collecting statistics is not good enough. So you should address this question to the competent bodies of Ukraine.

But according to our calculations, just to describe the situation in general: all Ukrainian teenagers under Russian control start receiving draft notices at the age of 16. According to the Russian legislation, it should be at the age of 17, but they're so afraid that these children will escape or will return to Ukrainian-controlled territories, that they start this process in violation of their own legislation.

Everything is organized around schools. They’re not about education under occupation, but have become additional buildings of the military commissariat. Specific teachers are responsible for this conscription process. Boys aged 16-17 are being brought to the military commissariat in organized groups. You cannot escape, you cannot refuse, because you will hear “knock-knock” on your door: the occupation authorities and your teacher will ask: “Where are you? You should go.”

Another problem: Russia and Belarus started exchanging data, meaning that if this child receives a draft notice at the age of 18, he will not be able to cross the border—which matters because the checkpoint of Mokrany-Domanove between Belarus and Ukraine is the main point of returning Ukrainian children from Russian control. Every year, the Russians amend their legislation to impose more obstacles to the repatriation process.

So the only way for a Ukrainian teenage boy to escape is to do this several days before a "povestka" [draft notice] comes to his house at 16 years.

According to our intelligence, since 2014, 48,000 Ukrainians from occupied territories were forcibly mobilized by Russians, including those from occupied Crimea. Some of them participated in the "special military operation.” Around 20% of all prisoners of war in Ukrainian camps for Russians are originally Ukrainians who were forced to sign a military contract. Many of them were forced, manipulated, or brainwashed, so it was not done of their own will.

But I would like to highlight that the average age of a Russian soldier is 35. This is not the war of young Ukrainians who reached the age of majority and were sent to the battlefield as cannon fodder. We see that the Russians’ main goal is to rebuild the army degraded by the Ukrainian side during the first month of the full-scale invasion, to have officers and other qualified personnel who will develop a strategy and conquer more and more territory. That is why they're investing in all these military patriotic movements and centers.

That is why I was really impressed when I saw that their All-Russian championship on drone racing will be for children aged seven. Should we next expect that children in kindergartens will assemble and disassemble a rifle? Their society is very militarized. This is the biggest problem. And now, Russian soldiers are those who are teaching Ukrainian children to fight tomorrow.

Alya: Thank you so much, Kateryna, for your time.

Kyiv's Desniansky District Court has formally recognized a same-sex couple as a family, marking the first legal precedent of its kind in Ukraine, human rights organization Insight LGBTQ announced on July 3.

Ukraine does not currently recognize same-sex marriages or partnerships, and this court ruling may serve as a critical legal milestone in expanding rights for LGBTQ families.

The case involves Zoryan Kis, first secretary of Ukraine's Embassy in Israel, and his partner Tymur Levchuk, who have lived together since 2013 and were married in the U.S. in 2021.

The court ruled on June 10 that their relationship constitutes a de facto marriage, establishing them as a family under Ukrainian law.

The ruling comes after Ukraine's Foreign Ministry refused to acknowledge Levchuk as Kis' family member, denying him spousal rights to accompany Kis on his diplomatic posting to Israel. In response, the couple filed a legal complaint in September 2024.

In its decision, the court cited both the Ukrainian Constitution and precedents from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which requires states to ensure legal recognition and protection for same-sex families.

Join our community

Support independent journalism in Ukraine. Join us in this fight.

Support Us

Evidence considered by the court included shared finances, property, witness testimony, joint travel records, photographs, correspondence, and other documents establishing a long-term domestic partnership.

"A very big and important step toward marriage equality in Ukraine, and a small victory in our struggle for 'simple family happiness' for Ukrainian diplomats," Kis wrote on Facebook.

"Now we have a court ruling that confirms the feelings Tymur Levchuk and I have for each other," he added, thanking the judge who heard the case.

Public support for LGBTQ rights in Ukraine has grown in recent years, particularly since the start of Russia's full-scale invasion. According to a 2024 poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, 70% of Ukrainians believe LGBTQ citizens should have equal rights.

Despite shifting public opinion, legislative progress remains slow. A draft law recognizing civil partnerships, introduced by Holos party lawmaker Inna Sovsun in March 2023, has not advanced in parliament due to a lack of approval from the Legal Policy Committee.

The proposed bill would legalize civil partnerships for both same-sex and heterosexual couples, offering them inheritance, medical, and property rights, but not the full status of marriage.

As Trump ‘loses interest’ in Ukraine, Kyiv scrambles to clarify extent of U.S. military aid pause

When the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) halted the transfer of critical air defense missiles and other weapons to Ukraine, Kyiv and its partners were caught off-guard and are now left scrambling for clarity on the scope and length of the Trump administration’s decision. The White House confirmed the halt after a July 1 report by Politico said shipments were paused due to concerns over the size of domestic stockpiles. The decision “was made to put America’s interests first following a DOD rev

The Kyiv IndependentAndrea Januta

Ukrainian journalist Vladyslav Yesypenko was released on June 20 after more than four years of detention in Russian-occupied Crimea, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported.

Yesypenko, a freelance contributor to Crimea.Realities, a regional project of RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service, reported on various issues in Crimea before being detained by Russia’s FSB in March 2021.

He was accused of espionage and possession of explosives, charges he denied, and later sentenced to five years in prison by a Russian-controlled court.

Yesypenko said he was tortured, including with electric shocks, to force a confession, and was denied access to independent lawyers for nearly a month after his arrest.

RFE/RL welcomed his release, thanking the U.S. and Ukrainian governments for their efforts. Yesypenko has since left Russian-occupied Crimea.

“Vlad was arbitrarily punished for a crime he didn’t commit… he paid too high a price for telling the truth about occupied Crimea,” said RFE/RL President Steven Kapus.

During his imprisonment, Yesypenko became a symbol of press freedom, receiving several prestigious awards, including the Free Media Award and PEN America’s Freedom to Write Award.

His case drew support from human rights groups, the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine, and international advocates for media freedom.

Russia invaded and unlawfully annexed Crimea in 2014, cracking down violently on any opposition to its regime.

Following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Kremlin toughened its grip on dissent, passing laws in March 2022 that prohibit what authorities label as "false" criticism of Russia's war.

Crimean Tatar freed from Russian captivity: ‘Recognizing Russia’s control of Crimea would legitimize crime’

For nearly two years in Russian captivity, Leniie Umerova clung to a single hope: that one day, she would return home — to Crimea. “I thought about Crimea all the time,” Umerova told the Kyiv Independent. “I dreamed of going there without the permission of the occupying forces, without going through

The Kyiv IndependentDaria Shulzhenko