A photograph taken on June 23, 2022 shows a strict-regime penal colony IK-6 near the village of Melekhovo outside the town of Vladimir, some 250 kilometres outside Moscow.
NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA
Russia has recruited a unit of Ukrainian POWs, a think tank said. They’ve now started fighting Ukrainian troops, Russian media claimed. Enlisting POWs is banned under the Geneva Convention.
Russia sent a unit of Ukrainian prisoners of war to fight against their own countrymen, Russian media reports said.
The Institute for the Study of War think tank cited Russian state media reports saying the POWs fought Ukrainian troops near Urozhaine, east Ukraine.
According to reports in November, about 70 Ukrainian POWs had been recruited from Russian penal colonies to form a fighting unit.
They were trained and sent back to fight in the frontline Donetsk region, the reports said.
Russian state media outlet RIA Novosti in November broadcast footage showing what it claimed was Ukrainians swearing an oath to fight for Russia.
But Ukrainian intelligence officials disputed the Russian reports, claiming they were part of a disinformation operation.
“As of now, this is yet another IPSO [information and psychological operation] of the occupiers and yet another public war crime of the Russian invaders,” Andriy Yusov, of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, told the Kyiv Post Thursday.
The POW is said to be called the Bogdan Khmelnitsky battalion, after a cossack warlord who in the 15th century brought parts of what’s now Ukraine under Moscow’s control.
The ISW notes that “the use of POWs in military activities on the side of the power that has captured them” is banned under the Geneva Conventions, which Russia claims to uphold.
It’s not the first time Russia has been accused of violating rules over the treatment of POWs, with the UN alleging that Ukrainian prisoners are tortured and otherwise abused in Russian captivity.
According to reports, Russian troops even recently used Ukrainian POWs as human shields in combat.