Last year, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) published a major report on the status of global compliance with international humanitarian law, warning that its legitimacy is at risk due to a lack of respect, deliberate violations, and expedient interpretations that threaten to turn it into “a justification for violence rather than a shield for humanity”.
The fundamental documents of international humanitarian law – or IHL – are the four Geneva Conventions adopted in 1949, which also mandate the ICRC to promote IHL and provide humanitarian assistance to victims of war and violence.
Just over 75 years later, IHL is on shaky ground globally. In addition to the concerns outlined in the ICRC report, critics argue that it is outdated or that the mechanisms and organisations meant to uphold it – such as the ICRC itself – are failing in their mandates.
Evident double standards on the part of countries that hold disproportionate sway over the levers of international justice have helped fuel the sense of crisis and disillusionment. Ukraine is often cited as an example of where Western powers – at least until Donald Trump returned to the US presidency – have insisted on IHL being upheld. But even in Ukraine, people are increasingly questioning the relevance of IHL, and the institutions tasked with promoting adherence to it.
Since Russia first occupied Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014, the country’s government has appealed to international law to bolster its cause, bringing several partially successful cases against Russia at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Following Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and another Russian official for alleged war crimes.
Neither of these actions have had any discernible restraining effect, while Russia’s status as one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council seems to give it licence to act with impunity – much as America has used its status on the council to shield itself and its allies.
“It makes [IHL] a joke,” Ukrainian human rights activist turned army officer Maksym Butkevych, who spent over two years as a prisoner of war in Russia, told The New Humanitarian. “You disobeyed and there is no penalty, especially if you are a permanent member of the Security Council.”
Perhaps more than any other issue, Russia’s treatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war (PoWs) – and the perception that the ICRC has failed to stop or even mitigate abuses – has driven deepening scepticism about IHL in Ukraine. The PoWs are not only captives in an armed conflict; they have become part of an information war and an assault on values that risks tearing up the rules designed to protect them.
The Moscow Convention
Around the same time that the ICRC released its report on the status of IHL, a coalition of Ukrainian government offices, ministries, and civil society organisations published what they call the Moscow Convention. The document turns the legal language of the Geneva Conventions on its head to enumerate the abuses Russia has carried out against Ukrainian PoWs – and to accuse the world and the ICRC of essentially condoning these crimes.
“Russia tortures Ukrainian prisoners and does not allow international organisations to visit them. These are direct violations of the Geneva Conventions,” the website reads. “Due to its ‘neutrality’, the Red Cross is silent about Russia’s crimes and allows it to write its own rules.”
The ICRC in Ukraine says the charge is a misunderstanding and a mockery of the laws and values underlying its humanitarian missions and the rules of war.
The Moscow Convention “is an expression of the frustration of the Ukrainian authorities; I understand where it is coming from, and I see the motivation behind it, but I’m very irritated that an element of IHL, the Geneva Conventions, are mocked,” ICRC’s head of delegation in Ukraine, Jürg Eglin, told The New Humanitarian. “Neutrality is not there as a moral concept but is defined as a tool, an instrument through which things can be achieved that could not be done otherwise.”
The 1949 Third Geneva Convention includes unambiguous legal articles on the treatment of PoWs, stipulating, among other things: protection from violence, including torture and collective punishment; provision of adequate medical treatment, food, clothing, hygiene and exercise; regular correspondence; and confidential visits from the ICRC, which is mandated to monitor conditions of detention and inform relatives of POW’s whereabouts.
Thousands of Ukrainian PoWs experience the opposite. “Name to me any single article of the Geneva Convention regarding PoWs that was observed,” Butkevych said, referencing his time in Russian detention. “Well, they didn’t kill us on the spot, which they did to others.”
Russia is holding thousands of PoWs and Ukrainian civilians in over 100 places of detention in Russia and occupied Ukrainian territories, according to Ukrainian human rights groups and the governmental inter-agency Coordinating Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War. The actual number of people is not known, as Russia often does not fulfil its obligation to inform Ukraine about the prisoners it holds.
Ukraine holds a likely smaller but also undisclosed number of Russian PoWs in five camps. The sides have agreed to over 60 prisoner exchanges since 2022, returning more than 4,500 Ukrainian PoWs and likely a similar number of Russians.
Taken prisoner in June 2022, Butkevych experienced beatings, inadequate food, a total lack of hygiene, months with no exercise or even shoes, and frequent collective punishment, before being exchanged in October 2024.
The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) says that abuse and systematic torture is experienced at almost all stages and locations of detention, and from multiple state security and penal services across the Russian Federation and in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory.
“The torture is of a scale and scope that is quite frankly difficult to imagine,” HRMMU’s head of mission, Danielle Bell, told The New Humanitarian, adding that the abuses are the worst she has encountered in 24 years of human rights work in East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Central African Republic, and Sudan.
The HRMMU has no access to places of detention in Russia or occupied territories. Its findings are based on in-depth interviews with over 400 exchanged Ukrainian PoWs. They conclude that more than 95% are subjected to torture, including severe beatings, electric shocks, sexual violence, mock executions, and humiliating and degrading treatment.
“Often, they have been held for more than two years in multiple facilities where torture was an everyday reality,” Bell said.
With little visibility, it is unclear exactly how many Ukrainian PoWs have died in Russian custody. HRMMU has confirmed 21 deaths, while Ukraine’s Coordinating Headquarters says 169 bodies have been returned – of those, 84 were registered as PoWs with the ICRC. Fifteen civilians have also died in conflict-related Russian custody, according to the Coordinating Headquarters.
Ukrainian authorities have documented – often from publicly available drone footage – over 170 executions of captured Ukrainian combatants; HRMMU has verified 79.
Evidence published in international media, including from Russian prison officers who have fled Russia, indicates that the torture and executions are deliberate Russian state policy.
On the Ukrainian side, the HRMMU mission has been given unfettered access to Russian PoWs in prisons and camps since 2022, according to Bell, who added that when the mission has documented ill-treatment, the authorities quickly implemented changes. Some instances of torture and ill-treatment still occur before prisoners reach official places of detention, and “we have ongoing dialogue with the Ukrainian authorities about this,” she said.
Instrumentalisation of IHL
Russia has not responded to Ukraine’s protests or HRMMU’s findings on its abuse of PoWs. But it frequently cites IHL when it wants to condemn Ukraine for infringements – an example of countries selectively referencing IHL to serve their own interests.
“I do recall occasions where our reports have been quoted by Russian authorities for the reporting we do on torture of Russian PoWs,” said Bell. “So the credibility of our findings is recognised.” The mission’s role is to put facts on public record to counter deeply politicised or false narratives, she added.
According to Butkevych, after he was captured, “the Geneva Conventions never started”.
Instead, courts in occupied east Ukraine and Russia convicted and sentenced him for allegedly violating the conventions himself by firing on civilians (evidence shows Butkevych was not even in the location where the alleged crime took place).
“The next time I saw the Geneva Conventions being mentioned was in the official accusation against me, and in the court verdict,” he said. “They use [the conventions] to accuse Ukrainian PoWs of breaching them, and that’s it.”
In a further irony, once he had been sentenced as a supposed war criminal, Butkevych’s detention conditions actually improved. He was allowed outside correspondence and could watch TV in prison.
Russia has tried and sentenced hundreds of Ukrainian POWs, both for alleged war crimes and for simply belonging to certain Ukrainian army battalions that it designated as terrorist organisations in 2022. In 2023, a booklet promoted by Russia’s UN delegation was circulated at UN sessions. It contained testimonies of supposed crimes against humanity committed by Ukrainian forces in parts of east Ukraine now occupied by Russia. Many of the testimonies are from Ukrainian PoWs, whose names and photographs are included.
HRMMU notes that the court cases violate the principle of immunity for merely participating in hostilities and the PoWs’ rights to fair trials. There is “high risk that the self-incriminating statements of Ukrainian PoW contained in the book have been extracted under duress”, according to its 2023 report, which also noted that the book violates PoWs’ rights to be shielded from public curiosity.
Punished for speaking Ukrainian, deprived of all contact with the outside world, told they have been abandoned by their country and their families, PoWs who have since been exchanged say they gave false testimony or signed confessions to make the torture stop and in the hope they would then be released in an exchange.
For families, meanwhile, published confessions and court rulings can sometimes be the first news they receive of their loved ones. Although warring sides are obliged to inform next of kin via the ICRC, the majority of families of Ukrainian PoWs have no contact with their loved ones and do not know where they are being held, or even if they are still alive.
“It’s so tough on families, because the only thing they know for sure is that their loved one is deeply suffering,” said Bell.
Anger with the ICRC and the UN
The overwhelming evidence of abuse has shocked and enraged Ukrainian society. It has deepened hatred of Russia and disillusionment with the entities tasked with monitoring and upholding adherence to IHL. That anger often focuses on the ICRC, which is mandated to visit PoWs but has barely any access to those held by Russia.
The ICRC, which has worked in Ukraine on both sides of the front line since 2014, has come under criticism since the first days of the full-scale invasion in 2022.
In May 2022, it facilitated the evacuation and registration as PoWs of several hundred Ukrainian combatants from the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol. When Russia began putting them on trial, and over 50 others were killed in an explosion at a prison camp in Olenivka in the Russia-occupied area of Donetsk Oblast, many of their relatives felt the ICRC had betrayed them. An association of their relatives was part of the coalition that published the Moscow Convention.
Serhiy Tarasiuk, 58, was among the surrendering soldiers who were transferred to Olenivka. Russia has refused to allow the UN or the ICRC access for an investigation into the explosion. Serhiy survived. In May 2023, the ICRC informed his wife, Ludmila Tarasiuk, that Russia had confirmed he was a PoW.
“I had some hope then that, if they had confirmed it, then possibly that meant there would be some greater responsibility for human life,” Ludmila said.
But exchanged PoWs told her that her husband was being kept in a cell with about 40 others who had contracted tuberculosis, many of whom were dying without medical treatment. “I realised what captivity is: It is a slow death,” she said.
Tarasiuk joined a delegation of relatives who visited the ICRC headquarters in Geneva in 2023 in the hope of encouraging some intervention. But her faith in an international system of justice represented by the UN and the ICRC was in tatters.
“I imagined it completely differently. It seemed that these were such influential organisations, respected and really able to do something. Now, any hope regarding either organisation is long gone,” she said.
Her husband finally came home through a prisoner exchange at the end of last year.
Mandates and expectations
The ICRC says that expecting the organisation to call out atrocities or enforce compliance with IHL is a misunderstanding of its capabilities and its role, which is to remain publicly neutral and non-political so it can speak confidentially to all sides in a conflict in order to assist non-combatants.
Dialogue with Russia, according to Eglin, allows the ICRC to continue providing humanitarian aid in occupied Ukrainian territories (it’s the only international agency allowed to operate there), raise the issue of treatment of PoWs, and provide families with information about their relatives in captivity through National Information Bureaus on both sides and the ICRC’s Central Tracing Agency (CTA) in Geneva.
The CTA has provided information to 12,500 Ukrainian and Russian families about the fate or whereabouts of their loved ones. Over 12,000 messages have been exchanged between PoWs and family members, while over 5,400 PoWs have been visited. The data, however, are deliberately not disaggregated, to the fury of Ukrainian authorities, who say the vast majority of visits are to Russian PoWs in Ukraine.
“It would be good for the ICRC not to manipulate such numbers, but to clearly say how many visits they were able to do,” said Petro Yatsenko, spokesperson for Ukraine’s Coordinating Headquarters for the Treatment of PoWs. “Don’t be afraid to say which side broke IHL.”
Eglin points out that other organisations are documenting and drawing public attention to the plight of Ukrainian PoWs – and none have succeeded in gaining better access to them or improving their conditions. For the ICRC to resort to a last-ditch “right to denunciation” – employed extremely rarely in the organisation’s history – would only curtail what little the ICRC has been able to achieve, he said.
“We have little or nothing to gain by speaking out, because we are not sitting on information that the world doesn’t already know,” said Eglin. “We could do better, we could do more, but speaking out would compromise, very quickly, the things we are doing.”
That argument is not very convincing for people who have experienced Russian detention first-hand, like Butkevych, who spent much of his life working with humanitarian organisations, such as UNHCR (the UN’s refugee agency), and as an international human rights activist.
Initially, Butkevych and other PoWs held out hope that the ICRC would provide some kind of relief, or assistance at least to let their families know they were still alive, but it never materialised. After a while, “we stopped waiting”, he said. “I’m afraid at some point PoWs treated the ICRC rather as a joke.”
The end of respect for IHL and neutrality?
Many in Ukraine argue that humanitarian organisations must always point out where rules are being broken, and by whom. “Of course the nature of war is to destroy all rules. But we know that invaders like Russia continue to work with the wider world, and in the wider world people should know how to behave with such an invader and how to prevent them from committing war crimes,” said Yatsenko.
Amnesty International, which recently published a report on abuse of Ukrainian PoWs, sees it differently. “Let the ICRC carry out their mandate,” Veronika Velch, CEO of Amnesty International Ukraine, told The New Humanitarian. “It’s joint work. What we can do is advocate, so that’s what we will do.”
While the ICRC tries to continue its work behind the scenes, the public findings of other agencies should trigger international accountability mechanisms to halt violations of IHL and deter parties from committing new ones, said Bell from HRMMU.
“We hope that, one day, there will be full accountability, investigation, prosecution, punishment, reparations, effective remedy for those who have suffered these horrific violations – and also prevention,” she added.
Despite declining respect, IHL is the only instrument the world has to reduce war’s devastation in Ukraine and elsewhere, said Eglin. “What’s the alternative?” he asked.
Human rights groups and authorities in Ukraine have made suggestions, from updating the Geneva Conventions to cover new technological developments, such as online communication with relatives, to replacing or complementing the ICRC with a network of national human rights ombudspeople or a third-party country to intervene on PoWs’ behalf.
Another proposal is to draft a new convention that would envision concrete sanctions for violations of IHL. But as long as violating countries are members of the UN Security Council – or their close allies – such steps are unlikely to be supported.
Meanwhile, as the terms of a possible but uncertain peace deal between Ukraine and Russia are being debated in foreign capitals, many in Ukraine fear that Russia will never be held accountable for its aggression and war crimes.
Retaining humanity and respecting international law when facing a world that appears to have abandoned it is hugely challenging, Butkevych said. Yet, despite his own experience, he still believes in the values of IHL and that it is in his country’s own interest to uphold them – even with Russia.
“I believe that Ukraine still needs to treat Russian PoWs according to IHL, because we are not them (Russia), and we should not be like them. We should treat humans like humans,” he said. “I really believe this, even if sometimes it is difficult to grasp the injustice.”
Edited by Eric Reidy.
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