By Alice Edwards
August 7, 2025
The New York Times
One of the few successes to come out of the recent peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia have been agreements for prisoner swaps. At the end of May, the largest swap since the beginning of the war took place, with each side handing over more than 300 service personnel and civilians. This week President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on Telegram that preparations are being made to exchange 1,200 more.
There are still thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians — including journalists, activists and residents of the occupied territories — being held in cramped and unsanitary facilities in a network of detention centers across Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia itself. They are held, often incommunicado, in overcrowded facilities where they are physically and psychologically tortured, underfed and denied legal representation and medical care. Some have been returned to their families in body bags.
Prisoners on both sides of this conflict have reported being subjected to abuse, despite the humane treatment of prisoners of war being demanded by international law. Based on my findings, only one side employs torture as an integral part of its war policy: Russia. Though Russia has denied that it employs torture, the consistent and widespread nature of witness accounts while in Russian custody — along with Moscow’s failure to address the issue — have led me to the conclusion that it can only be a systemic, state-endorsed practice approved at the highest levels. This creates profound distrust in Russia as a negotiating partner.
Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion over three years ago, I have documented allegations of beatings — by Russian forces and other authorities of Ukrainian prisoners of war as well as civilians — that last for hours, egregious sexual violence, electric shocks, suffocation, sleep deprivation and mock executions. Malnourishment is routine and individuals have reported being hung upside down and held in other stress positions for prolonged periods, sometimes while being beaten. Many of my findings have been supported by those of other international authorities, including the U.N. Commission of Inquiry.
The stories are horrifying. Oleksandr Kharlats, a Ukrainian veteran who was detained twice early in the war, described to me in an interview that he was held in a small cell with around eight other men. Mr. Kharlats said he was interrogated six or seven times, sometimes at night and always with the same approach: He would be electrocuted while being forced to hold his arms along his body to intensify the pain. When he fell to the floor with convulsions, he said, soldiers would hit his back with the butts of their machine guns or beat his limbs with batons.
Anatoliy Tutov told me that he was interrogated four times during his detention and that these interrogations included repeated electrocutions, beatings and sexualized torture, including a threat to cut off his penis and rape him. After his release, he was diagnosed with bruises on his internal organs, two broken ribs and cracks in several others.
A civilian from an occupied region in Kherson, whose release I am pursuing, was detained on the street with no warning while heading to work early last year. She reported being raped and electrocuted on her first day in detention. She has since been moved repeatedly to different facilities and is now in a prison in Russia.
Russia uses torture to extract strategic or military intelligence, as a warning and punishment to anyone who is loyal to Ukraine and to instill fear and obedience to Russia and the Russian-backed authorities in occupied areas. Forensic reports from the Kyiv suburbs Bucha and Irpin, which were occupied by Russian forces early in the war, have documented many bodies with signs of perimortem trauma — trauma at or around the moment of death — consistent with torture.
The very ubiquity of this treatment of prisoners in Russian custody cannot be allowed to obscure that this is a crime prohibited by international law for which there are no exceptions, no amnesties and no statute of limitation. Investigating and prosecuting torture is a legal obligation, not a diplomatic nicety or something that can be negotiated or leveraged during negotiations.
Past peace settlements, like the Dayton Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, imposed an obligation on the parties to cooperate in war crimes investigations. Justice, even if almost always incomplete, cannot be completely absent.
Piecing together the evidence will not be easy. There has been a concerted effort to gather physical evidence of torture as well as testimony, but Russia has gone to great efforts to conceal its crimes. In my interviews with prisoners from earlier swaps, released Ukrainians described how they were warned that if they spoke about their experiences, other detainees would pay the price, and they were moved to different facilities ahead of prisoner exchanges and held for just enough time to allow most of their bruises to fade. And there are significant challenges for forensic experts in securing the bodies and determining the cause of death for those who have died in custody. In some cases, internal organs are missing or bodies have decomposed.
There have been reports of Ukrainian violations of Russian captives, which must also be independently investigated; some Russian fighters have reported a heightened risk of mistreatment immediately after capture, during interrogation and while being transported. Ukraine, however, has allowed me to visit its prisoner-of-war camps, and during an unannounced inspection of one in Lviv, I found that there were sincere efforts to treat the more than 300 detainees decently. Vigilance on both sides is essential. My own requests to visit and inspect Russian-controlled facilities have been repeatedly declined.
The thousands of people imprisoned or abducted by Russia are not leverage. If a just and lasting peace to the war in Ukraine is to be achieved, it will require a cease-fire agreement that as well as resolving questions of territory and security guarantees, demands the prompt return of all
remaining prisoners. No Ukrainian citizen can be left in the hands of known torturers, and victims must have a venue to seek accountability for cruel and degrading abuse.
Any peace deal must also facilitate the return of the at least 19,000 Ukrainian children that the Ukrainian government has reported as having been forcibly removed to Russia, Russian-occupied territories and Belarus, many of whom have been put up for foster care or adoption in Russia. There must be reparations and rehabilitation for survivors, as well as unfettered access to detainees and detention sites for international monitors, including the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Dr. Alice Edwards is the United Nations special rapporteur on torture. She has gathered testimonies from victims and their advocates, and has carried out her own fact-finding in Ukraine.