War prisoners How both Russia and Ukraine jail thousands of civilians using nearly identical KGB-era entrapment methods
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Because of the Russia–Ukraine war, thousands of people in both countries have ended up in prison. Meduza reveals how security services target their own citizens, and why almost no one will help those imprisoned.
Who are the ‘war prisoners’?
In Russia, the human rights organization Memorial counts at least 1,450 people imprisoned on wartime political charges. The offenses range from social media posts to fabricated acts of treason and entrapment-driven “terrorist” attacks. In most cases, Memorial notes, the only victim of the supposed crime is the accused.
In Ukraine, more than 30,000 criminal cases have been opened under collaboration and wartime security statutes. Courts, which acquit at a rate of 0.05 percent, have ordered more than 2,000 arrests. According to the U.N. Human Rights Office, at least 21 of 326 people found guilty of collaboration between June and November 2025 were convicted for actions that could lawfully be compelled by Russian occupiers.
The invasion of Ukraine has put thousands of civilians behind bars on both sides of the conflict. Not all of these people meet the criteria that organizations like Amnesty International use to designate political prisoners, but they nevertheless constitute a distinct group that Meduza calls “war prisoners.”
In a special report for Meduza (available here in Russian), journalist Shura Burtin spent months documenting war prisoners in both Russia and Ukraine. He reviewed hundreds of published court verdicts, watched scores of video interviews conducted by state-backed propagandists with convicted “collaborators,” and systematically compared the claims of each country’s domestic intelligence agency with what appears in the actual case files. Burtin’s central finding is that both countries’ security services — institutional descendants of the KGB — have responded to the war with the same methods, producing a single phenomenon: thousands of convictions against civilians who pose no threat to anyone.
Who ends up behind bars?
On the Russian side, the largest group consists of Ukrainian civilians seized in occupied territories during “filtration” sweeps at checkpoints or in raids on their homes. Memorial has identified 573 with active criminal cases. At least 1,500 more are held in a legal gray zone, detained without charges under a designation — “held for opposing the special military operation” — that appears nowhere in Russian law.
In Ukraine, many war prisoners are Ukrainians convicted for working during the occupation — a broad category that includes everyone from postal workers who stayed at their counters to people who, under varying degrees of coercion, took on leadership roles vacated by officials who had fled. Sentences range from five to 15 years. Ukrainian courts sometimes draw little distinction between those who were coerced and those who volunteered.
Beyond these two groups, both countries hold prisoners whose offenses amount to speech. In Russia, poets, librarians, students, and pensioners are serving up to 15 years in prison for social media posts, graffiti, and, in some cases, interviews with journalists. Several have died in custody. In Ukraine, people have been sentenced for phone calls to relatives in Russia and Russian-occupied territories, for liked social media posts, and for private messages in which they described military activity visible to anyone in town.
Telephones figure in another category of war prisoners: the predominantly elderly Russians targeted by Ukrainian scammers. Fraud operations deceive seniors into draining their bank accounts, then manipulate them into committing arson — convincing them they are assisting Russian law enforcement. Victims face terrorism charges carrying sentences of 10 years or more. Intelligence services in both countries also recruit the other side’s teenagers through darknet channels, messaging bots, and gaming platforms, paying small sums to set fires or photograph military sites. These teenagers face terrorism charges carrying sentences of up to 20 years. In more extreme cases, intelligence services recruit civilians — sometimes teenagers — as unwitting carriers of explosives, sending them to their targets and sometimes to their deaths.
Burtin’s research highlights another group: the victims of entrapment operations that both countries’ intelligence agencies run against their own civilians.
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How do so many random people end up in prison?
Burtin found that the Russian and Ukrainian security services entrap and convict their own civilians using almost identical methods. Both contact targets via social media from accounts using the opposing side’s phone prefixes, and ask for information about troop locations and local conditions that is often publicly available. Both treat any compliance as grounds for prosecution, and both extract confessions through coercion and false promises of prisoner exchange.
In Russia, Burtin documents the Federal Security Service contacting people through fake Ukrainian accounts, posing as Ukrainian intelligence officers or representatives of the Legion “Freedom of Russia,” a Ukrainian-based paramilitary unit of Russian citizens. The human rights organization Memorial analyzed 33 such cases and found a consistent pattern: an agent befriends the target, nudges them toward a minor act (photographing a building, filling out a form, transferring a small sum), and then the arrest follows, regardless of whether the target acted or backed out.
In Ukraine, Burtin found the same mechanics at work. A person posts something sympathetic to Russia or complains in a local chat that the military’s presence is putting the town at risk. A stranger contacts them from an account with a Russian +7 phone number, posing as a military or intelligence figure. The contact requests photographs or information about troop locations. The person provides something — sometimes as little as confirming common local knowledge — or provides nothing, in which case authorities fabricate the evidence. In either event, officials announce the arrest of another “dangerous collaborator.”
Yevgeny Smirnov, a Russian defense lawyer who specializes in these cases, estimates that the Federal Security Service fabricates 70 to 80 percent of the country’s treason and terrorism convictions. Inmates in Ukrainian prisons report similar numbers. Construction worker Roman Karpenko, sentenced to nine years, put it plainly in an interview: “I’m the one person in 400 here who actually gave targeting information to Russian forces.”
By checking press releases against case files, Burtin found that both countries’ intelligence officials routinely misrepresent the evidence against suspects. When Yaroslav Zabashta of Izium was arrested, the agency declared that the “collaborant helped the Rashists fabricate cases against resistance members, leaking to the occupiers the addresses of Ukrainian patriots remaining in the city.” The published verdict contains none of this. Zabashta is charged with working in a police station for two months — after Russian soldiers detained him during curfew, held him in a basement, and told him he would not be released unless he agreed to work in the police. Even one of the prosecution’s witnesses testified that masked men had beaten him for nine months “for the purpose of providing untruthful testimony” against Zabashta.
Burtin’s clearest evidence of these entrapment patterns comes from an unlikely source: video interviews conducted by Volodymyr Zolkin, a Ukrainian propagandist who works with the state’s prisoner exchange program. Zolkin interviews convicted “collaborators” on camera with the stated purpose of validating the prosecution system, but because he asks detailed questions and his subjects answer at length, the recordings contain first-person accounts that reveal how these cases are actually constructed. Burtin’s conclusion: “Blinded by his own sense of superiority, Zolkin doesn’t understand that he is recording ever more evidence of repression.”
Officials on both sides rely on methodologies so similar, Burtin writes, “that it is as if we are dealing with one organization.”
Does anyone defend ‘war prisoners’?
On the Russian side, where Burtin documented prosecutions under harsher legal frameworks, groups like OVD-Info, Mediazona, First Department, and Every Human Being operate under severe pressure, but their work extends beyond monitoring. They provide legal support, publish lists, and advocate on behalf of prisoners. In Ukraine, no organization takes on that work.
Though Zmina, Human Rights Watch, and the U.N. have all documented systemic flaws in Ukraine’s collaboration prosecutions, no institution recognizes the people swept up in these cases as political prisoners. No group advocates publicly for their release.
Yevhen Zakharov, head of the Kharkiv Human Rights Group, is one of the few willing to discuss this on the record. He agrees that the prosecutions are unjust, but he told Burtin that most Ukrainian human rights organizations “prefer not to enter into conflict with the state and society, which mostly supports the persecution of collaborators.” He also argued that Burtin, as a Russian journalist, “shouldn’t be criticizing the Ukrainian security services.” “Leave them to us,” he said. His own organization does not provide legal aid to war prisoners.
Defense lawyers who take collaboration cases face pressure from territorial recruitment centers in the form of conscription notices — a tactic the National Bar Association has formally protested to the defense minister. Outside Ukraine, there has been little scrutiny of the country’s war prisoners and even less pressure to free them. While working with Meduza on this research, Burtin pitched the story to 30 major newsrooms across Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Britain, and the United States. All declined. After an hour-long argument, a correspondent at the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel finally explained the editorial logic: “We can’t compare Russia with Ukraine.”
Is there a way out?
Burtin argues that prisoner exchanges, the only existing mechanism for freeing these people, often compound the problem. For an exchange to work, both sides need prisoners to trade. The more convictions a security service produces, the more leverage the state holds at the negotiating table. This dynamic, he argues, has turned convictions into currency, incentivizing both sides to produce more of them. When Russia and Ukraine conducted their first civilian exchange in May 2025, the trade itself illustrated the dysfunction: Russia returned inmates whose sentences had already expired, while Ukraine sent convicted “collaborators” who were required to renounce their citizenship before crossing sides and risking statelessness.
Though the U.S.-brokered peace process has stalled, the latest framework contains a provision for “the return of civilians, including children and political prisoners,” suggesting exchange, not amnesty. A separate clause promises “full amnesty for actions during the war,” but the wording covers combatants, not civilians convicted under wartime statutes. Burtin suggests that this approach would pardon people who killed while ignoring civilians who never harmed anyone.
The prospect of a general amnesty briefly surfaced when Russia’s memorandum at the Istanbul talks included a clause calling for the mutual release of political prisoners — a remarkable admission by Moscow that Russia has such prisoners — but the clause generated no visible interest from negotiators or the international rights community. Former Novaya Gazeta editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov and Belarusian writer Svetlana Aleksievich — both Nobel laureates — along with Oleg Orlov, a leader of the Nobel Prize–winning human rights organization Memorial, have called on Putin and Zelensky to free civilian war prisoners. The appeal has gone unheeded.
Amnesty would cost both governments less than almost anything else on the negotiating table. The prisoners — postal workers, teenagers, pensioners, grandmothers who liked a social media post — are not a security risk. Releasing them requires no troop redeployments and no territorial concessions. The only thing both sides stand to lose is the myth of their own infallibility. “An ephemeral thing,” Burtin writes, “that it would be right to trade for peace.”
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