Thread by @ChrisO_wiki

1/ The Russian authorities are reportedly not telling relatives of soldiers that their men have been taken prisoner in Ukraine, leaving the relatives to find out directly from the Ukrainians – or from scammers. Since August, the Russians have stopped exchanging POWs. ⬇️

2/ North.Realities, part of Radio Free Europe, reports on the case of 21-year-old Yegor Minin, who went missing while fighting in Ukraine in March 2023. His family have been trying to establish his whereabouts ever since.

3/ On 17 March, a message reporting his death was posted, but soon afterwards deleted, on the VK social network. His squad was hit by a shell, killing and wounding a number of men. Yegor was said to have been injured and received treatment on the spot, but he was not evacuated.

4/ Yegor's girlfriend managed to contact Ukraine's SBU in the summer but they said they had no information on him. In September, callers claiming to be from the SBU told her that Yegor was alive and in custody in Uzhgorod, awaiting trial on criminal charges.

5/ It's unclear whether the callers really were from the SBU and they offered no proof of life for Yegor. However, they did not ask for money and informed the family that they should contact the Russian Ministry of Defence to request a prisoner exchange.

6/ According to Yegor's sister Nadya, "[the Ukrainians] sent information about Yegor to our side four times, but for some reason [the Russian MOD] didn’t react at all, they ignored it."

7/ The Russia authorities are known for keeping relatives in the dark. Many people seeking information on the missing have contacted the Russian MOD, local enlistment offices, regional administrations and Putin's office, but have either been ignored or given no help.

8/ This has left the field open to numerous scammers, including psychics, fortune-tellers, and impostors pretending to be employees of the Ukrainian MOD or SBU. They typically charge relatives huge sums for purported information on relatives' whereabouts or status.

9/ As the Minins' lawyer says, "Since Russia classifies every sneeze, it is very difficult to find out any information, even about prisoners. This total chaos breeds scammers like cockroaches."

10/ To make matters worse, according to Petro Yatsenko of the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War in Ukraine, Russia has "frozen" the exchange of prisoners with Ukraine since August 2023.

11/ "We are ready to exchange, we have a lot of prisoners of war at the moment. Our detention centres are filling up, and we do not need to keep these Russian prisoners of war at all. We would gladly exchange them even tomorrow for our defenders," he says.

12/ They (Russia) are not interested in the fate of their own prisoners of war. They are just bargaining chips and meat for artillery for the Russian side."

13/ The Times recently reported that Ukraine is having to build new POW camps because the existing ones are full due to the Russian freeze on exchanges. According to the purported SBU men who called the Minins, Ukraine is holding 16,000 Russian POWs.

14/ Both countries have carried out prisoner exchanges: around 1,000 Russians returned home in 2022 through 30 such exchanges. 2,589 Ukrainians are reported to have been returned so far. Neither side has said publicly how many POWs it is holding.

15/ It's not clear why Russia has stopped prisoner exchanges. Yatsenko speculates that it's an attempt "to undermine Ukrainian society, trying to convince the relatives of prisoners of war that exchanges are not taking place due to obstacles on the Ukrainian side."

16/ "[Provoking] calls for some kind of mass actions. And thus they use prisoners of war as another lever of influence over the Ukrainians."

17/ @ian_matveev suggests that the cessation is linked to political controversy in Russia about releasing prisoners from the Azov Battalion. Either way, it highlights the Russian government's indifference about its soldiers' welfare.

18/ "500 people for such a war is not much. There will be no special dividends [from a prisoner release] for the army, and Putin doesn’t care about people as such and their families." /end

Sources:
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🔹 severreal.org/a/govoryat-cht…
thetimes.co.uk/article/inside…
currenttime.tv/a/rossiya-zamo…