In a Russia-Ukraine peace deal, releasing all captives is essential
Releasing all of this war’s captives, Russian and Ukrainian alike, should be central to negotiations.
It is clear that some sort of ceasefire agreement will be reached in the coming weeks. Time is short for settling its key points. What will be the boundaries between Ukrainian and Russian forces? What security guarantees will Ukraine get from NATO to ensure Putin doesn’t attack again? Will the frozen Russian assets in the West be employed to rebuild Ukraine? These and other questions must be answered — and the free world must ensure they are answered in a way that addresses the legitimate needs of a Ukrainian state ravaged by three (in reality, 11) years of unprovoked and brutal war.
But there is one issue that should be beyond questioning and that should necessarily be included in the settlement: the fate of all the captives of this war. Last month, in anticipation of the likely ceasefire talks — and in a rare joint action — a coalition of Ukrainian and Russian human rights groups launched a campaign to place human lives at the center of negotiations. “Lives taken by war cannot be recovered,” said Oleg Orlov, co-chair of Russia’s Memorial Human Rights Defense Center and a former political prisoner freed in the same exchange as I was last August. “It is all the more important to rectify what can be rectified. First and foremost, this means returning freedom to those who are in captivity because of the war.”
Needless to say, this includes prisoners of war on both sides — who, under the terms of the Third Geneva Conventions, must be “released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities.” But it also includes groups not formally covered by international humanitarian law. In the three years since the full-scale invasion, Russian forces have captured tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilian hostages, including some 20,000 children who have been forcibly transferred to Russian territory, leading to a war crimes indictment against Putin by the International Criminal Court.
Many of the hostages are held incommunicado; many are enduring torture and inhumane conditions in detention centers in Russia and Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. Even children are being jailed by Russian authorities. Securing their release as part of any postwar settlement is an absolute must for Western negotiators.
And there is another group that the Ukrainian and Russian organizations’ campaign is demanding to be released as part of the ceasefire: “Russian political prisoners already sentenced to prison terms or awaiting sentences in connection to their antiwar statements and actions.” According to publicly available, and self-admittedly incomplete, figures from human rights groups, Russia holds roughly 1,500 political prisoners; more than the entire Soviet Union held in the mid-1980s. This coming week alone, at least 215 people are set to be tried in courtrooms across Russia on politically motivated charges. And the fastest-growing category on that list consists of Russians who protested the war in Ukraine — an act criminalized by Putin in the invasion’s first days.
The protests have taken different forms. In the case of Alexei Gorinov, a Moscow municipal lawmaker, it was his calling, at a council meeting, for a minute of silence for Ukrainian children killed by Russian bombs. The price was seven years in prison. In the case of Maria Ponomarenko, a journalist from Siberia, it was writing the truth about the Russian airstrike on the theater in Mariupol, Ukraine, that left hundreds of civilians dead. The price was six years in prison. In the case of Dmitry Ivanov, a talented mathematician arrested on the day of his final exam at Moscow State University before he could graduate, it was posting on social media about war crimes committed by Russian forces in Bucha and elsewhere in Ukraine. The price was eight and a half years in prison. And the list goes on, more names than would be possible to mention, of Russian citizens who have refused to stay silent in the face of the Putin regime’s atrocities.
Like Ukrainians, these Russians are captives — and victims — of this war, and the West must not overlook their fate in its negotiations with the Kremlin. For many, such as Gorinov or Ponomarenko, this might be the last chance of survival, because of ill health and the conditions of their detention. This week, members of Russia’s rubber-stamp parliament proposed an amnesty bill that explicitly excludes people imprisoned for opposing the Ukraine war. All it would take to add them is one phone call from a mid-level Kremlin official — provided that Putin’s Western interlocutors include this item among their negotiating conditions.
I dare say that securing the release of all of this war’s captives, Ukrainian and Russian alike, would be the most important aspect of this settlement. Many other provisions will, by definition, be temporary. There is little doubt, for example, that any post-Putin government in Russia seeking legitimacy and a return to normality in its international relations would renounce the illegal annexation of Ukrainian territories and return to the recognized borders of 1991. But many of the people captured and imprisoned during this war will not be able to wait that long.
Their lives must be saved — and the time for that is now.
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