More than four years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion, one of the least visible dimensions of the war remains hidden behind prison walls. The United Nations estimates that more than 16,000 civilians detained by Russia during the conflict are still being held, many of them incommunicado and without a clear legal basis for their detention.
The figure is not a complete registry containing the name and confirmed location of every missing detainee. International monitors do not have access to detention facilities inside Russia, leaving the true scale difficult to establish. The estimate also does not distinguish between adults and children.
More disturbing than the number alone is the pattern of treatment described by those who have been released. Among 403 former civilian detainees interviewed by U.N. human rights monitors, 85 percent reported torture or ill-treatment. Among 910 Ukrainian prisoners of war who were interviewed, the share exceeded 95 percent.
As Daycom has previously assessed, those figures illuminate a defining feature of Russia’s occupation system: detention has become more than a byproduct of military operations. It functions as an instrument of control, allowing civilians to disappear into a network of prisons and holding facilities long before relatives learn where they are or what accusations, if any, have been made against them.
Accounts from survivors repeatedly describe the same methods — beatings, electric shocks, sexual violence, humiliation, food deprivation and inadequate medical care. Many detainees have spent prolonged periods without meaningful access to lawyers or regular communication with their families.
For Ukrainian prisoners of war, the consequences are measured not only in testimony but in documented deaths. U.N. human rights monitors have recorded the execution of 129 Ukrainian POWs at the beginning of their captivity and the deaths of another 48 in custody as a result of torture, denial of medical treatment or other inhumane conditions.
Behind those numbers are individual cases that reveal how the system operates. Ukrainian serviceman Khuan Leyva Garsiya, one of the defenders of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, spent 1,183 days in Russian captivity. When he was released, he weighed 55 kilograms and later showed the U.N. Security Council a photograph of his emaciated body.
Born in Mariupol to a Ukrainian mother and a Cuban father, Garsiya said his background became an additional reason for abuse. His captors suspected him of being either a foreign mercenary because of his Cuban ancestry or an American spy because he had attended college in the United States.
He described freezing, beatings, electrocution and sexual abuse designed not only to inflict physical pain but to break prisoners psychologically and force confessions to fabricated crimes. Two of his friends, he said, were beaten to death in detention facilities in the Donetsk region. Two others died because of prison conditions.
The experience of Crimean Tatar human rights activist Leniie Umerova exposes another part of the same machinery. She was detained while attempting to travel from Georgia through Russia to visit her seriously ill father in Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula occupied by Russia since 2014.
Umerova had access to a lawyer, and a court eventually ordered her release. But as soon as she left prison, a bag was placed over her head and she was taken away again. Over six months, she was moved through seven different facilities — a process she described as a “carousel of repression.”
Uncertainty itself becomes a method of coercion. For families, the normal logic of law disappears: there may be no reliable information about where a person is being held, no predictable detention period, no clear status and no procedure capable of guaranteeing that a court order or formal release will actually return someone home.
International humanitarian law provides a distinct framework for prisoners of war, including rules governing their treatment, exchange and repatriation. The position of civilians is fundamentally different. Civilians are not supposed to become an informal reserve for prisoner swaps, and their detention requires specific legal justification.
That distinction makes the fate of thousands of civilians particularly difficult to resolve. A captured soldier enters a defined legal category as a prisoner of war. A civilian seized in occupied territory or detained at a checkpoint may instead disappear into the space between criminal prosecution, administrative detention and what effectively becomes enforced disappearance.
This has created another battlefield in the war: the struggle to establish who is being held, where and under what status. For Ukraine, identifying detainees means reconstructing names, locations, medical conditions and legal circumstances. Without that information, even negotiations over releases begin with a dispute over people whose presence in the detention system may first have to be proven.
Moscow rejects allegations that abuse is systemic and maintains that Russian forces comply with international humanitarian law. Russian representatives have also accused Ukraine of torturing and degrading Russian prisoners of war.
U.N. monitors have documented violations on the Ukrainian side as well. About half of the 816 Russian prisoners of war and 57 third-country nationals interviewed after captivity reported torture or ill-treatment, primarily during the initial stages of capture and interrogation.
But once Russian prisoners reached official Ukrainian detention facilities, conditions generally complied with international humanitarian law and had improved since 2022. That distinction matters because it separates documented abuses from the broader question of whether mistreatment has become an entrenched feature of an entire detention system.
For Russia, the detainee issue is becoming increasingly difficult diplomatically because it cuts across several categories at once: prisoners of war, civilians, Crimean Tatars, residents of occupied territories, political prisoners and abducted Ukrainian children. Their legal circumstances differ, but the political demand surrounding them is the same — their return.
That is why the problem cannot be solved through large military prisoner exchanges alone. Civilians require a separate mechanism capable of verifying detention locations, establishing legal status and creating a route home that does not depend on negotiations over captured soldiers.
The estimate of more than 16,000 people conveys the scale of the problem while obscuring its most painful dimension. Behind every case is a family that may spend months or years without knowing whether a relative is alive, where that person is being held or whether any functioning legal process exists to bring them back.
In a war usually measured in kilometers of front line, missiles fired and drones launched, civilian detainees form a different geography of the conflict. It is a map of prison cells, detention centers, penal colonies and unknown addresses. Even after the fighting eventually stops, that hidden map is likely to remain one of the war’s most enduring and difficult legacies.
