Inside the PoW camp where Ukraine ‘re-educates’ Russians
He may not like it, but it is for his benefit, say officials at the camp for Russian prisoners of war. When he signed up to fight in July, Nikolai, 39, from Primorsk, did so in the belief that Russians and Ukrainians were one people being torn apart by a perfidious Nato.
Today, Nikolai wakes up at 6am to the sound of the Ukrainian national anthem playing out over the loudspeaker in his bunk room. After breakfast, he observes a minute’s silence for those killed as a result of Russia’s invasion.
“I grew up in the Soviet Union so I feel that we are one country,” he said, sitting in the camp’s sick bay where he is recovering from a bullet wound in his arm.
It is this neo-imperialist ideology, famously expounded by President Putin in a 7,000-word essay, that the camp authorities are trying to deprogramme from their charges before they are returned home.
“Russians have been subjected to propaganda their whole lives,” said Petro Yatsenko, spokesman for Ukraine’s co-ordination headquarters for the treatment of PoWs, during a tour of the camp at an undisclosed location in western Ukraine. “It’s like trying to pull someone out of a religious sect.”
To get from their living quarters to the canteen, prisoners must pass along an alleyway lined with photographs of figures from Ukraine’s past, such as Stepan Bandera, the divisive and controversial leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) during and after the Second World War, and Taras Shevchenko, the 19th-century national bard.
“It’s a crash course in Ukrainian history that we give the prisoners to debunk Putin’s claims that Ukraine is not an independent nation,” Yatsenko said.
The camp is full and more are being built. Russia has frozen prisoner swaps with Ukraine since the summer
Emblematic of how most Russian prisoners view Ukraine, he said, was one new arrival who looked at the picture of Bandera and thought it was a photograph of a young Putin.
“We are not forcing them to engage with it but the hope is that over time they somehow begin to accept it,” Yatsenko said.
The camp is the largest in Ukraine, and it is here that PoWs will wait until they are sent home either in a prisoner exchange or at the end of the war.
The Ukrainian authorities do not disclose how many Russians have been returned and the number in custody. To date 2,589 Ukrainian prisoners have been returned in exchanges.
Prisoners are put to work making garden furniture. Many were convicts set free on condition they fought for Russia in Ukraine
However, a freeze on swaps, implemented by Moscow in the summer, means that the camp is at capacity and more are having to be built.
In accordance with the Geneva Conventions, the PoWs are put to work six days a week, for which they are paid $8 a month enabling them to buy drinks and sweets from the camp’s shop. Coca-Cola, unavailable in Russia since the invasion, is by far the most popular item.
In a workshop, about 100 shaven-headed prisoners wearing blue uniforms worked in silence building furniture. Asked why they did not talk to each other, one prisoner said: “We have already said all there is to say.”
Another prisoner, Nikita, 27, who was working with a metal hook to craft a garden chair, said he was enlisted directly from prison near Moscow where he had been serving a three-year sentence for drug offences. The military recruiter offered him automatic release in exchange for six months’ service.
He was given three weeks of training before being sent to the front line in September near Robotyne, where he spent five days in a dugout under heavy shelling and was captured in an ambush. “After only three weeks of training, I didn’t feel at all prepared,” he said.
About a third of all PoWs in the camp are former convicts, recruited by the army into the Storm-Z penal military units, according to Yatsenko.
Many of them are much older than those prisoners who were mobilised or are professional soldiers. The oldest I met was Mikhail, a 58-year-old with arthritic hands, who had joined up in order to foreshorten his six-year term in North Ossetia.
Yatsenko said that some ex-convicts had been attempting to implement “criminal order” inside the camp, based on the deep traditions of Russian prison hierarchy.
“Some of them want to try and show that they are the big guy around here,” he said. “We very quickly stop that. We tell them that if you don’t behave we will set you free and let the Ukrainians deal with you. That usually works.”
Additional reporting by Viktoria Sybir