report
Since the beginning of the war, many members of the Russian army have become prisoners of war in Ukraine. They are in prison or in the country’s only prisoner of war camp. Andrea Beer spoke to some of them.
Hundreds of men, some in faded gray and blue jackets and trousers, sit in the canteen of the Russian army’s only camp for prisoners of war in Ukraine. Where exactly it is located and how many men are imprisoned there is not publicly known. On this day, among other things, stew with meat and potatoes with white bread is on the menu.
“Thanks for lunch”
Prisoners who finish stand up, fold their arms behind their backs and say “Thank you for lunch” in unison in Ukrainian. The men eat in shifts, and the line extends from the food counter down the stairs and out into the courtyard. On the high stone walls with barbed wire hang pictures of Ukrainian personalities from the past centuries and all previous presidents since independence. Ukraine, which the Kremlin wants to destroy, has a long history, according to the embassy.
Russian prisoners in the canteen.
The prisoners of war came from Russia and the Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, says Petro Yatsenko from the responsible coordination office in Kiev, who tours the camp. The majority of the men served no sentence, but some were convicted of war crimes.
Yatsenko mentions shootings of Ukrainian civilians. “The best-known example is Bucha. But in every Russian-occupied city there were crimes against the civilian population, people were killed, tortured and raped for no reason. And those who did that are actually criminals who use the war to commit crimes.”
“They consider us terrorists”
It’s all fictitious, claims prisoner of war Ruslan, who assembles garden furniture in a workshop. The grumpy man in his early 40s complains about the food and the daily roll calls. He comes from the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk and says Ukraine attacked Donbas. “They see us as terrorists, as separatists. Sorry, but if they start killing us, what will we do?”
In the hospital ward, beds are close together. The wounded there have disfigured faces, bandaged heads, amputated arms and legs or even stomach ulcers. Some read, others follow the journalists with looks that seem like a mixture of interest, contempt and suppressed anger.
Garden furniture is manufactured in a factory hall.
Did you not notice the cruelty of the Wagner troupe?
Hundreds of kilometers away, Dmitry Vorobyov sits in the basement of an official building in Kiev. The 41-year-old is wearing a Russian uniform and is being guarded by an armed Ukrainian soldier. The Russian from the Volgograd region has hired the notorious Wagner mercenaries three times – because of the money, as he says. Among other things, he fought near Bakhmut and was wounded several times. Of the 25 people he started with, five were still alive after almost two weeks.
Vorobyov says he knew nothing about the atrocities committed by the Wagner troupe. He is an apolitical person. In mid-July he switched to the regular Russian army and returned to Ukraine, where he surrendered at the beginning of September. Vorobyov does not make a distinction between the Wagner mercenaries and the Russian army.
“Just get away from it all”
Aleksandr Gaponov from Chelyabinsk reported to the army from a Russian prison. Now he sits in a sober room in the prisoner of war camp for members of the Russian invasion troops. The 28-year-old was sentenced to ten years in prison in Russia for a robbery. From prison he volunteered for Ukraine and was placed in a so-called “Storm Troop Z”. According to the American Institute for the Study of War, these units consist primarily of recruited prisoners who are deployed on particularly dangerous sections of the front.
In July, in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine, his legs were so badly wounded that he could only crawl, says Gaponov. “They didn’t want to evacuate me until the evening, and I said that I might not be alive by then. I kept crawling, just away from everything, and then I was captured by the Ukrainians.”
Russian side exchanges fewer prisoners
The ARD conducted the interviews in the prisoner of war camp without Ukrainian supervision. But the prisoners are probably censoring themselves anyway. Everyone we talk to says they knew nothing about the sadistic cruelties committed by the Russian side against Ukrainian prisoners of war or about the killing, torturing and raping of Ukrainian civilians. Or they call these acts fabricated.
The prisoners of war want to go back to Chelyabinsk or Donetsk. But since the summer there have been very few prisoner exchanges – with a few exceptions, says Jatsenko from the Kiev coordination office. “Unfortunately, the Russian side has frozen this process, and this is a very big problem.”
Yatsenko would prefer that all men from the prisoner of war camp be exchanged for Ukrainian prisoners: “You can believe me, I would rather be rid of them today than tomorrow.”