Ukraine Military History Institute
Russia says Ukraine blocks exchanges. Malik's release says otherwise
Ievgen Malik puts the question bluntly. When Russians say they cannot exchange prisoners, he says, they blame it on the Ukrainian side not wanting to.
Then he describes what happened once Ukraine held something Russia did want back. When the Ukrainian side had Russian conscripts, the exchange came in one week, or two, three weeks maximum. "So who doesn't want it?"
That is the argument in a sentence, and the rest of his account, with Rob Lee filling in the mechanism, supports it. How fast a prisoner exchange happens depends heavily on which Russians Ukraine is holding.
The beating on August 24 came with no explanation
Malik did not learn about the event that freed him while he was still a prisoner. On August 24 the guards were angry. They beat the prisoners, in his words, "like, for the last time," and nobody knew why.
Only after he came home did he connect it. Ukraine had pushed into Kursk and was beating Russian forces there, and the guards were furious about it. The prisoners were never told.
The men whose release depended on that operation were the last to hear about it and the first to absorb the anger it caused.
Kursk produced the one kind of prisoner Russia trades quickly
Lee explains why Kursk mattered so much. Russian conscripts are not supposed to be deployed into Ukraine, or to wars at all. They are allowed to serve in Russia proper, on the border. That is exactly where the Kursk operation met them.
In the first couple of days, Lee says, Ukraine took what he thinks was 500 or 600 prisoners of war, mostly conscripts. Only a month later, Ukrainians like Malik were already being exchanged for them. Lee counts that as one of the benefits of the operation.
Malik supplies the reason conscripts move the Russian state when other prisoners do not. Russia tries to get them back because of their mothers. A captured conscript is, as he puts it, a social problem. The pressure to bring him home comes from inside Russia.
He watched the trade happen on the road through Belarus
Malik's own exchange ran through Belarus. An old man in a civilian suit boarded the bus and offered some good words about Lukashenko. Malik laughs at the memory and suspects the man was a Belarusian KGB agent. The prisoners were given food, then moved on to the Chernihiv region.
On the way he saw prisoners moving in the other direction, toward the Russian side. Lee notes they were mostly young men. Conscripts, Malik thinks.
It is a small scene, but it is the whole argument made visible. The people travelling back to Russia were the category Russia had a domestic reason to want returned.
A contract soldier in captivity is already counted as dead
The contrast is Russia's contract soldiers, and here Malik and Lee say the same thing. Russia does not push for exchanges on their behalf.
Lee's explanation is that a soldier who signs a contract is not supposed to retreat and not supposed to surrender. Russia does execute soldiers, he says, and basically does not want to exchange for contract men now.
Malik reduces the contract soldier's position to two sentences. "You're fighting or you are dead. If you are in captivity, you are dead already." For the Russian side, he says, bringing those men back "is not a problem at all."
Russian prisons are also a recruiting ground
Lee raises something Malik had told him earlier. Other prisoners in the same facilities were beaten too, perhaps not in the same way, and Lee understood part of the reason to be pressure to sign contracts.
Malik confirms it, with the caveat that situations differed. Because of the war, Russia has been searching for recruits, and this is one of the ways Russia got recruits. Prisoners are tortured into signing contracts, he says, "as if they are volunteers."
That closes a loop. The contract a prisoner may be beaten into signing is the same contract that, on Malik's and Lee's account, makes Russia indifferent to whether he ever comes back from captivity.
One prisoner's account, specific enough to test
Malik counts 650 Ukrainians in the prison where he was held. After his exchange, his first stop was a hospital in Dnipro, for approximately one week.
His account is one prisoner's view, and Lee's figure for the Kursk captures comes with his own "I think." But the pattern they describe is concrete. Exchanges move when Ukraine holds Russians that Russian society wants returned, and Russia has little reason to hurry for anyone else.
What to watch
- Exchange timing after large captures of conscripts. If Malik and Lee are right, a big haul of Russian conscripts should be followed by an exchange within weeks. A large capture followed by a long stall would cut against the claim.
- Contract soldiers in exchange lists. Lee says Russia basically does not want to trade for them now. Exchanges that bring contract soldiers home in significant numbers would show that policy has changed.
- Conscripts captured inside Ukraine. Lee says conscripts are not supposed to be deployed there. If they start appearing among prisoners taken on Ukrainian territory, the rule that makes them politically protected, and quickly exchanged, has shifted.