Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Khyliuk, who spent more than three and a half years in Russian captivity, said that Russia deliberately captures Ukrainian civilians and uses them as potential leverage in prisoner exchanges.
Khyliuk spoke about this in an interview with Daria Shcherbakova on the BlueBird Tech YouTube channel.
According to Khyliuk, one of the key issues is the very status of civilian detainees. International humanitarian law does not provide for a situation in which civilians are held captive for years, yet Russia systematically continues this practice.
“Under the Geneva Conventions, civilians should not be held captive at all. The very concept of a ‘civilian in captivity’ is absurd,” Dmytro Khyliuk explains.
Khyliuk noted that Ukraine cannot simply exchange civilians for Russian prisoners of war, as this could give Russia an incentive to detain civilians en masse in temporarily occupied territories.
“Ukraine cannot exchange civilians for military personnel because that would open Pandora’s box, while the pool of civilians in the occupied territories is virtually unlimited,” Khyliuk emphasizes.
According to the journalist, Russia may be holding tens of thousands of civilians and could then use them to secure the return of its own military personnel. At the same time, he noted that Ukraine does manage to bring some civilians home, including through exchanges involving Russian agents and Ukrainian collaborators.
Khyliuk also emphasized that the issue of civilian detainees remains largely overlooked by Ukrainian society. He recalled cases in which people, after being released, were genuinely unaware that Ukrainian civilians were being held in Russian captivity at all.
