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                    "Pavlo Oliynyk, 25, says he joined enemy forces to escape Russian captivity. Before his capture\u00a0in the Donbas region in 2024, he was a senior lieutenant for Ukraine's armed forces.\n\nAs a prisoner of war (POW), he says he was electrocuted, beaten\u00a0and psychologically tortured. So when he received the offer to join the Maksym Kryvonis battalion \u2014\u00a0named after a famous 17th-century Cossack commander \u2014\u00a0he accepted.\n\nOliynyk says he wanted to use this opportunity to reach the front lines, so he could escape to Ukrainian-controlled territory. DW was able to contact Oliynyk through his lawyer.\n\n'Ukrainian volunteers' consist\u00a0mostly of POWs\n\nReports of Russian combat units consisting of Ukrainian prisoners of war and former service members of Ukraine's armed forces began emerging in late 2022. Several detachments were initially formed and in August 2026, they were merged into the so-called \"Ukrainian Volunteer Special Forces Brigade.\"\n\nPavlo Oliynyk says he defected to Russian forces in order to escape captivityImage: Privatarchiv\n\nOf the individual units, the Maksym Kryvonis battalion has perhaps drawn the most public attention for having evidently taken part in combat. Its true size is unknown \u2014\u00a0Russian media reports claim about 200 fighters while available footage only suggests several dozen.\n\nAn investigative team of the Ukrainian public broadcaster Suspilne has identified\u00a0over 30 members and confirmed they are all former Ukrainian servicemen, captured by Russian forces between 2023 and 2024.\n\nAn 'imitation' of Russian legions fighting for Ukraine\n\nPavel Luzin, an expert for Russian foreign policy and defense at\u00a0the Center for European Policy Analysis, believes these units are an \"imitation\" of the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Freedom of Russia Legion \u2014 units in the Ukrainian armed forces, consisting of Russian citizens \u2014 and an attempt by Moscow to distract from the fact that these units exist in the first place. Ukrainian intelligence services tend to agree.\n\n\"It bothers them\u00a0that Russians would fight\u00a0on Ukraine's side, but Ukrainians won't fight on Russia's side,\" Yevhen Shybalov, author and veteran of the war in Ukraine, told DW. He added\u00a0that Russian troops have never tried to hide the fact that Russian volunteer units in Ukrainian ranks were the main reason Russian forces wanted to create Ukrainian units for their own\u00a0ranks.\n\nJust how voluntary are these combat units?\n\nIn 2025, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reported that 95% of the released Ukrainian POWs interviewed reported torture or ill-treatment during Russian captivity.\n\nBill Wiley, executive director of the NGO Commission for International Justice and Accountability, said the physical and psychological state of the returned combatants raises serious doubts that their recruitment was voluntary. Mykhailo Savva of the Center for Civil Liberties, a Kyiv-based human rights organization,\u00a0points to the criminal procedures running against several of the battalion members, which he said indicates\u00a0that these suggest\u00a0the combatants had switched sides voluntarily.\n\nBut where to draw the line between voluntary and involuntary recruitment? The war veteran and human rights activist Maksym Butkevych, who spent 28 months as a prisoner of war, said the conditions in Russian captivity make that line hard to distinguish. On the one hand, he said, there is a constant atmosphere of pressure, and on the other hand, it's not implausible that some prisoners defected out of ideological proximity.How were Ukrainian prisoners made to join Russian forces?\n\nButkevych told DW that between 2022 and 2023, all Ukrainian prisoners of war had received offers, \"more or less persistently,\" to join the Russian army. In his case, he recounted, it was after he had been severely mistreated.\n\n\"They showed us they could do anything they wanted to us,\" he explained, \"which was why we should agree to everything.\"\n\nThe veteran Shybalov reported\u00a0similar experiences,\u00a0speaking\u00a0of attempts to force confessions of war crimes, or to recruit members for Russia's intelligence services. He told DW all prisoners were first interrogated and then made certain propositions under duress.\n\n\"You can torture people to get them to confess, but there comes the difficult moment when you need to give them a weapon,\" he said. \"That's why it's more about psychological pressure, and forcing voluntary compliance.\"\n\nButkevych confirmed\u00a0these accounts with his own tales. But neither veteran has ever met someone willing to join Russian units, they said.\n\nWhat happens after conscription?\n\nOliynyk, from the Maksym Kryvonis battalion, said he initially turned down multiple bids to join Russian forces. He said he only accepted the fourth offer so he could flee.\n\nHe claimed\u00a0he didn't sign official Defense Ministry paperwork, but a private contract with an individual offering military services. Afterwards, he said, he was brought to a room where he heard lectures and saw videos and photos he was later asked to retell.\n\nPutin's foreign fightersTo view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video\n\nControl and mistreatment\n\nOliynyk said\u00a0fellow service members in the Maksym Kryvonis battalion consisted both of those who had switched sides of their own volition, and those who had been forced.\n\nIn a video circulating online that appears to be of a trial in Ukraine, he also says former Ukrainian POWs in the unit were followed and guarded by mercenaries of the private Russian military company Redut. In the same video, he also speaks of beatings and torture, and receiving monthly wages in envelopes handed out by a member of Russia's military intelligence.\n\nOliynyk told\u00a0DW he had been given a phone, but that he was too scared to call anyone in Ukraine because it was under constant surveillance. He denied\u00a0having fought against Ukrainians, as he fled\u00a0in March 2025\u00a0before his first deployment in the Donetsk province. After running across a field, he said he spent two days hiding from drones in basements and houses before making contact with Ukrainian fighters.\n\nNow, Oliynyk has been in detention in Ukraine for nearly two years while authorities investigate possible treason. He has yet to be formally charged.\n\nSergey Nikitin contributed to this article, which originally appeared in Ukrainian."
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