There are no prisoners, but there is a case – Newspaper Kommersant No. 231 (7432) dated 12/13/2022
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“Detained” by the Ministry of Defense, Ukrainian serviceman Nikita Shkryabin “is not a defendant in any criminal cases, he is not being prosecuted,” while he “does not have any procedural rights, including a lawyer.” This was reported with reference to the decision of the military court in the international human rights group “Agora”, where they claim that the case of the Ukrainian prisoner of war was considered for the first time. The Ministry of Defense confirmed that Nikita Shkryabin was “detained for countering a special military operation” at the end of March 2022, but did not say where he is now.
The interests of Ukrainian citizen Nikita Shkryabin, according to the head of Agora Pavel Chikov, are represented by lawyer Leonid Solovyov. At the end of March 2022, Nikita Shkryabin was “detained for counteracting a special military operation,” according to the Defense Ministry’s response to a request from Solovyov’s lawyer. Currently, he “is on the territory of the Russian Federation, his state of health is satisfactory.” “The whereabouts of Shkryabin, as well as the procedural grounds for his detention, were not communicated to the lawyer with reference to “limited information,” Pavel Chikov noted. “The lawyer was expressly refused to visit him. The Ministry of Defense does not recognize Shkryabin as a prisoner of war.”
“An agreement has been concluded with me (to represent the interests of Nikita Shkryabin.— “b”), and the details are a lawyer’s secret,” said Mr. Solovyov, whom Kommersant asked to tell under what circumstances he became the defender of the Ukrainian soldier. “We were looking for him through the central apparatus of the Ministry of Defense,” he continued. “They told us that he was detained by the military, but we won’t say where he is being held.” After that, Mr. Solovyov applied to the military investigation department of the TFR with a statement about the crime of unidentified servicemen of the Russian army who were holding his client. The ICR refused to conduct an audit, and the lawyer filed a complaint against the inaction of the investigation to the garrison military court.
On Monday, December 12, “the court recognized the inaction of the military investigation as lawful,” said Pavel Chikov. At the same time, the court, according to the lawyer, also established three facts: Nikita Shkryabin was “detained”; he “is not a defendant in any criminal cases, he is not being prosecuted”; he “does not have any procedural rights, including to a lawyer.” Mr. Chikov, citing these facts, claims that the case of the Ukrainian prisoner of war has been considered by a Russian court for the first time. In this regard, he points to a legal conflict: “The captured Ukrainians are outside the legal field of Russia.” “In total, according to various estimates, there are several thousand captured citizens of Ukraine,” the head of the “Agora” says. “The whereabouts of most of them are unknown. The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, at the request of Russian lawyers, confirms the fact of detaining specific individuals, and also reports on the state of health. Information about the specific location is not reported, and access to them is prohibited.
The stay of captured citizens of Ukraine in the Russian Federation was repeatedly confirmed by the deputies of the State Duma and the commissioner for human rights in the Russian Federation Tatyana Moskalkova. The Ministry of Defense, in turn, periodically reports only about the “return” of Russian soldiers from Ukrainian captivity. “As a result of the negotiation process, 60 Russian servicemen were returned from the territory controlled by the Kyiv regime,” the department reported on December 6, for example. Acting head of the Donetsk People’s Republic Denis Pushilin on the same day said that there was not a return, but an exchange according to the formula “60 for 60”.
Kommersant turned to the Ministry of Defense for comments on the case of Nikita Shkryabin, asking, among other things, to report the number of captured Ukrainian citizens. The department did not respond to a request.
They did not comment on the situation in the International Red Cross, one of the core functions of which is to help prisoners. Note, on December 8, the BBC reported that a few days earlier, a commission of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) visited Ukrainian and Russian prisoners of war. Representatives of the ICRC delivered personal hygiene products, blankets, warm clothes and books to the prisoners. After that, the report says, the mission members contacted the relatives of each serviceman and described the situation.
According to various estimates, there may be from 10,000 to 14,000 captured Ukrainian citizens in the Russian Federation. According to Kommersant, all of them can be legally registered as “administratively detained” in the territories of the DPR and LPR. In these regions, the preventive measure in the form of arrest is assigned to the detainees not by the court, but by the prosecutor’s office. The same department monitors the inquiry, which is organized, as a rule, at the level of commanders of military units. If during the course of an inquiry it turns out that an administrative detainee is involved in a crime, they elect a preventive measure and charge him – these are sometimes sent to other regions of the Russian Federation. It is also known that a number of Ukrainian civilians accused under Art. 361 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (commission of acts of international terrorism). At the same time, the vast majority of detainees are kept in the colonies of the DPR and LPR. At various levels, talks about bringing the laws governing the situation of prisoners in the new territories into line with the laws of the Russian Federation have been going on since June, but there are no official clarifications from the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Supreme Court.
Lawyer Yegor Redin points out that the format of the “special military operation” prevents the spread of the norms of international law regarding the maintenance and treatment of prisoners of war to the actions of the Russian Federation in Ukraine. Mr. Redin emphasizes that, according to the Geneva Convention, the fact of capturing an enemy soldier “should be immediately notified through specially created prisoner of war information bureaus for each of the belligerents.” There is no such structure in Russia at the moment, and it is possible to find out the fate of a foreigner who was probably taken prisoner only through the International Committee of the Red Cross and through the Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation.
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