Russia is said to trade prisoners of war on a “black market” – and even sell wounded people to Chechen paramilitary groups.
Russia is said to trade prisoners of war on a “black market”. Ukrainian authorities accuse Russian troops of running a prisoner exchange underworld. According to this, even wounded people are said to have been sold to paramilitary groups. The British newspaper “The Times” reported this.
As the spokesman for the Coordination Office for the Treatment of Prisoners of War in Ukraine, Petro Yatsenko, reported to the newspaper, Chechen groups in particular were involved in the trade in captured Ukrainians. The Ukrainians would purchase these from other Russian military factions and exchange them for Chechen prisoners of Ukraine.
The Ukrainians would be taken to Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, by the Russian armed forces. According to Yatsenko, there have already been “cases when they bought our wounded from the Russian army, took them to Grozny, and then exchanged them for their own.”
A practice that probably also violates the Geneva Convention. Although there is no specific article prohibiting trade in prisoners of war, the agreement fundamentally provides that “no special agreement may negatively affect the situation of prisoners of war.”
“I was a prisoner of war”
For example, Ramzan Kadyrov’s Akhmat special forces are said to be involved in the illegal trade. The Chechen dictator’s fighters are known for their lack of discipline and for their extraordinary brutality against civilians. After the battles for Mariupol, Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk in 2022, most of them were transferred to the rear areas behind the front. It is difficult to take your own prisoners there.
The experts from the renowned US think tank ISW have commented on the topic. They suspect that some paramilitary forces within the Russian armed forces do not have access to the larger Russian-Ukrainian prisoner of war exchange.
The Times also spoke with a Ukrainian soldier captured by Russian forces in eastern Ukraine in February 2023. “I was a prisoner of war. Russia traded me on the black market,” 41-year-old Vyacheslav Levytskiy, who worked as a mechanic before the war, told journalists.
He was shot in both legs and in the abdomen during a night attack on his position in a dugout in the woods north of Avdiivka. When he regained consciousness the next day, he was alone and spent several days crawling across the frozen earth searching for the remaining members of his unit. He was then captured and taken to Grozny. There, both of his legs and his hands were amputated in a hospital.
Prisoner says he was treated fairly in Grozny
After recovering in the hospital, he was taken to a basement where he waited with 60 other Ukrainian prisoners for an exchange with five Chechens. In June 2023 he returned to Ukraine as part of an exchange. He told the Times that he had been treated relatively kindly in Chechnya, probably because his compatriots there also suffered under Putin’s regime, said Levytskiy, and therefore had sympathy for the Ukrainians.
According to the Times, 2,700 Ukrainian prisoners have been released so far as part of exchange measures. How many Russians Kiev released for this is unknown. It is believed that more than 4,000 Ukrainian military personnel are being held as prisoners of war in Russia, but the exact numbers on the Ukrainian and Russian sides are not known as both countries do not disclose this data.
