Ekaterina Girnyk21:57, 11/18/23

According to the representative of the Ukrainian coordination headquarters for the treatment of prisoners of war, Petro Yatsenko, re-educating the occupiers is similar to an attempt to “get someone out of a religious sect.”

After a full-scale invasion, one of the former penal colonies in Western Ukraine turned into the central and so far only camp for captured occupiers. This is where prisoners of war would wait to be sent home either through a prisoner exchange or at the end of the war.

An article by The Times describes how captured Russians live in the colony and the methods of their re-education .

“39-year-old Nikolai from Primorsk went to war believing that Russians and Ukrainians are one people who are tearing apart the treacherous NATO. But today he wakes up at six in the morning to the sounds of the Ukrainian national anthem, and after breakfast he honors with a minute of silence those killed as a result of the invasion Russia,” the article says.

“I grew up in the Soviet Union, so I feel like we are one country,” he said. 

And it is precisely this neo-imperialist ideology that the camp authorities are trying to deprogram from the prisoners before they return home.

At the same time, as Petro Yatsenko, speaker of the Ukrainian coordination headquarters for the treatment of prisoners of war, notes, this is like an attempt to “get someone out of a religious sect,” because Russians have been subjected to propaganda all their lives.

On the walls of the colony there are photographs of Ukrainian figures such as Stepan Bandera and Taras Shevchenko.

“This is a crash course in Ukrainian history that we give to prisoners to debunk Putin’s claims that Ukraine is not an independent state,” Yatsenko said.

Symbolic of how most Russian prisoners view Ukraine, he said, was one new arrival who looked at a photo of Bandera and thought it was a photo of a young Putin.

“Under the Geneva Conventions, prisoners of war work six days a week, for which they are paid $8 a month, which allows them to buy drinks and sweets in the Camp Store. Coca-Cola is by far the most popular item,” writes The Times.

About a third of all prisoners of war in the camp, according to Yatsenko, are former convicts recruited by the army into the penal units of Storm-Z. Many of them are much older than those prisoners who were mobilized or are professional soldiers. The oldest person the publication’s journalist was able to talk to was 58 years old.

Yatsenko also said that some former convicts tried to introduce a “criminal order” in the camp, based on the deep traditions of the Russian prison hierarchy.

“Some of them want to try to show that they are great people here,” he said. “We stop it very quickly. We tell them that if you misbehave, we will release you and let the Ukrainians deal with you. That usually works,” he said.

Prisoner exchange

As UNIAN reported, the commission on establishing the fact of captivity presented interim results of its work, according to which   4 thousand 337 Ukrainians are in Russian captivity .

The coordination headquarters noted that Russia had actually frozen the exchange of prisoners of war in order to undermine Ukrainian society.

(C)UNIAN 2023