Russia Groups Captured Ukrainian Soldiers Under "Ukrainian Volunteers" Banner, Former POWs Testify to High-Pressure Coercion

According to Deutsche Welle, in August 2026 Russia merged previously formed multiple units into the so-called "Ukrainian Volunteer Special Forces Brigade," among which the most attention-drawing is the Kryvonos Battalion, named after 17th-century Cossack leader Maksym Kryvonos. The investigative team of Ukraine's public broadcaster Suspilne has confirmed that more than 30 members of this battalion were all former Ukrainian Armed Forces personnel captured by Russian forces between 2023 and 2024, and verified each of them individually.

However, a significant gap exists between the true scale of these Russian military units appearing under the "volunteer" label and the Russian side's public statements. Deutsche Welle notes that Russian media publicly cite approximately 200 combatants, but available video footage shows only several dozen. Pavlo Olynyk, a former POW soldier from the battalion, told Deutsche Welle after being contacted through a lawyer that during his capture in Donbas in 2024, he was subjected to electric shocks, beatings, and psychological torture, and therefore accepted the offer to join the Kryvonos Battalion. Olynyk claims the intention was to seize an opportunity to enter the front lines in order to escape to Ukrainian-controlled territory.

A 2025 report by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights stated that 95% of released Ukrainian POWs interviewed reported suffering torture or abuse during Russian detention — a figure that provides critical context for examining the "voluntary" nature of such units. Maksym Butkevych, a former POW detained for 28 months and human rights activist, told Deutsche Welle that between 2022 and 2023, all Ukrainian POWs received offers to join the Russian military "more or less continuously," and that the offer was made to him personally only after he had been subjected to severe abuse.

"They made it clear to us that they could do anything they wanted to us, and precisely because of that we should agree to all their demands." Butkevych described the psychological pressure he endured during his Russian detention in these terms. Yevhen Khybalov, another veteran and writer, recounted a similar experience to Deutsche Welle: all POWs were first interrogated, then forced under duress to accept conditions, including being compelled to confess to war crimes or being recruited into Russian intelligence agencies. "You can beat a person to make him confess, but then comes the difficult part of having to hand him a weapon. So it's more about psychological pressure, forcing so-called voluntary compliance," Khybalov said. Both stated that they did not encounter in the POW camps any person who voluntarily wished to join Russian military units.

Pavlo Luzin, a Russian foreign policy and defense expert at the Center for European Policy Analysis, views these units as a form of "mirroring" of the "Russian Volunteer Corps" and "Freedom of Russia Legion" active in the Ukrainian Armed Forces — units composed of Russian citizens fighting against Russia. Ukrainian intelligence agencies tend to agree with this assessment. Citing this view, Khybalov further noted: "What worries Moscow is that Russians will fight for Ukraine's side, but Ukrainians are not willing to fight for Russia's side." In his view, the Russian military has never tried to conceal such an intent: the fundamental reason Russia forms these Ukrainian combat units is precisely to counterbalance the presence of Russian-nationality volunteer units in the Ukrainian army.

As for whether recruitment is voluntary or coercive, Mykhailo Savva of the Center for Civic Freedoms (Kyiv) noted that criminal proceedings against several battalion members indicate the possibility that some defectors voluntarily went over to the enemy side. But Butkevych believes that in the high-pressure environment of Russian custody, the boundary between the two is difficult to discern: on one side is the continuous high-pressure environment, while on the other, the possibility that some detainees defected out of ideological identification cannot be ruled out. Bill Wiley, Executive Director of the Commission on International Justice and Accountability, stated that the physical and mental condition of combatants returned to the front raises serious doubts about the "voluntary" nature of their recruitment.

Olynyk revealed that he initially refused multiple offers to join the Russian military, only "accepting" on the fourth occasion, with the aim still being to find an opportunity to escape. He claims what he signed was not an official Russian Defense Ministry document, but a private contract with an individual providing military services, after which he was taken to a room to listen to lectures, watch videos and photos, and required to retell their contents. He also mentioned that former Ukrainian POWs in the Kryvonos Battalion were tracked and guarded by mercenaries of the Russian private military company "Redut," personnel within the battalion were also subjected to beatings and torture, and salaries were distributed in envelopes by Russian military intelligence officers. Olynyk said he escaped in March 2025 while being deployed to Donetsk Oblast, after which he was detained by Ukrainian authorities for nearly two years and has not been formally charged to date.

What this formation pattern exposes is Russia's systemic pressure on POWs, and its mirror operation targeting Ukrainian intelligence and information warfare: pushing Ukrainian POWs to the front lines under systemic coercion, while packaging them in Moscow's domestic propaganda as "Ukrainians volunteering to fight for Russia" — using a so-called "volunteer" force composed primarily of Ukrainian POWs whose scale and reality diverge sharply, to counterbalance and obscure the large-scale participation of Russian citizens in the Ukrainian army.