Russian-Commanded Ukrainian 'Volunteers' Mostly Coerced POWs, Investigation Reveals

Pavlo Oliynyk was a senior lieutenant in Ukraine's armed forces when Russian troops captured him in the Donbas in 2024. In captivity, he says he was electrocuted, beaten, and psychologically tortured. When officers offered him a chance to join the Maksym Kryvonis battalion—a unit named after a 17th-century Cossack commander—he accepted. His stated reason was tactical: reach the front lines, then slip across to Ukrainian-controlled territory and escape. He turned down three earlier recruitment offers before accepting the fourth.

Russia has announced this battalion as proof that Ukrainian soldiers voluntarily fight under Russian command. The reality, according to investigations and testimony from returned prisoners, is far more complicated. A team from Suspilne, Ukraine's public broadcaster, identified over 30 members of the Maksym Kryvonis battalion and confirmed that all were former Ukrainian servicemen captured between 2023 and 2024. Russian media claims the unit numbers around 200 fighters; available video footage suggests several dozen. In August 2026, this battalion and other similar detachments were consolidated into what Russia calls the Ukrainian Volunteer Special Forces Brigade—a formation that began taking shape in late 2022.

The framing matters because Russia is not alone in fielding foreign fighters. Ukraine's armed forces include the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Freedom of Russia Legion, both composed of Russian citizens who chose to fight against their own country. Pavel Luzin, a defense analyst at the Center for European Policy Analysis, describes the Russian-commanded Ukrainian units as an "imitation"—a response designed to counter the embarrassment of Russians fighting for Ukraine by manufacturing evidence that Ukrainians fight for Russia. Yevhen Shybalov, a Ukrainian war veteran, put it plainly: "It bothers them that Russians would fight on Ukraine's side, but Ukrainians won't fight on Russia's side."

The question of voluntariness sits at the heart of the investigation. In 2025, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that 95 percent of released Ukrainian prisoners interviewed described torture or ill-treatment during Russian captivity. Bill Wiley, executive director of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, said the physical and psychological condition of returned combatants raises serious doubts about whether their recruitment could have been genuinely voluntary. Yet the line between coercion and choice is not always clear. Maksym Butkevych, a war veteran and human rights activist who spent 28 months as a prisoner, acknowledged that while Russian captivity created constant atmospheric pressure, it remained theoretically possible that some prisoners defected for ideological reasons. Still, neither Butkevych nor Shybalov reported ever meeting a prisoner willing to join Russian forces.

Between 2022 and 2023, Butkevych said, all Ukrainian prisoners of war received offers—"more or less persistently"—to join the Russian army. In his case, the offer came after severe mistreatment. "They showed us they could do anything they wanted to us," he told DW, "which was why we should agree to everything." Shybalov described similar tactics: interrogation followed by recruitment pitches under duress, attempts to extract confessions of war crimes, and pressure to join Russian intelligence services. The challenge for Russian commanders was practical. Torture can produce a confession, but at some point a soldier must be handed a weapon. That transition required psychological pressure and forced compliance rather than outright violence.

Oliynyk's account of his time in the battalion reveals the mechanisms of control. He said he never signed official Defense Ministry paperwork, only a private contract with an individual offering military services. After that, he attended lectures and watched videos and photographs he was later required to recount. Fellow prisoners in the unit included both those who had genuinely switched sides and those who had been coerced. Redut, a private Russian military company, assigned mercenaries to follow and guard the Ukrainian fighters. Oliynyk described beatings, torture, and monthly wages distributed in envelopes by a member of Russia's military intelligence. He was given a phone but too frightened to use it, knowing it was under constant surveillance.

Oliynyk's escape came before his first deployment. In March 2025, he fled across a field, spent two days hiding from drones in basements and houses, and made contact with Ukrainian fighters. He has now been detained in Ukraine for nearly two years while authorities investigate possible treason. He has not been formally charged. His case illustrates the bind facing Ukraine: men who were tortured into service, who attempted to escape, who never fired on Ukrainian forces, now face criminal investigation in their own country. The returned combatants remain suspended between two systems of accountability, neither of which has yet resolved whether a man coerced under torture can be held responsible for the uniform he wore.