Pavlo Oliynyk, 25, claims to have joined enemy forces to escape Russian captivity. Before his capture in the Donbas region in 2024, he was a senior lieutenant in the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
As a prisoner of war (POW), he says he was electrocuted, beaten, and psychologically tortured. So when he received the offer to join the Maksym Kryvonis Battalion – named after a famous 17th century Cossack commander – he accepted.
Oliynyk said 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.
“Ukrainian volunteers” are mainly prisoners of war
Reports of Russian combat units consisting of Ukrainian prisoners of war and former servicemen of the Ukrainian Armed Forces began to appear in late 2022. Several detachments were initially formed and in August 2026 they were merged into the so-called “Ukrainian Volunteer Special Forces Brigade”.
Among the individual units, the Maksym Kryvonis Battalion is perhaps the one that has attracted the most public attention for its obvious participation in the fighting. Its true size is unknown: Russian media speak of around 200 fighters while available images suggest only several dozen.
An investigative team from the Ukrainian public channel Suspilne identified
An “imitation” of the Russian legions fighting for Ukraine
Pavel Luzin, an expert on Russian foreign and defense policy at the Center for European Policy Analysis, believes that these units are an “imitation” of the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Russian Legion of Freedom – units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces staffed by Russian citizens – and an attempt by Moscow to distract from the fact that these units exist in the first place. Ukrainian intelligence services tend to agree.
“It bothers them that Russians are fighting on the side of Ukraine, but Ukrainians are not fighting on the side of Russia,” Yevhen Shybalov, an author and Ukraine war veteran, told DW. He added that Russian troops never tried to hide the fact that Russian volunteer units in the Ukrainian ranks were the main reason why Russian forces wanted to create Ukrainian units for their own ranks.
To what extent are these combat units voluntary?
In 2025, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reported
Bill Wiley, executive director of the NGO Commission for International Justice and Accountability, said the physical and psychological state of the repatriated fighters raises serious doubts about the voluntary nature of their recruitment. Mykhailo Savva of the Center for Civil Liberties, a kyiv-based human rights organization, points to ongoing criminal proceedings against several members of the battalion, which he says suggest the fighters had voluntarily switched sides.
But where do we draw the line between voluntary and involuntary recruitment? Veteran and human rights activist Maksym Butkevych, who spent 28 months as a prisoner of war, said conditions of captivity in Russia make this border difficult to distinguish. On the one hand, he says, there is a constant atmosphere of pressure, and on the other, it is not implausible that some prisoners defected because of ideological proximity.
How were Ukrainian prisoners lured into joining Russian forces?
Butkevych told DW that between 2022 and 2023, all Ukrainian prisoners of war received “more or less persistent” offers to join the Russian army. In his case, he says, it was after he had been seriously abused.
“They showed us that they could make of us whatever they wanted,” he explained, “that’s why we have to accept everything.”
Veteran Chibalov reported similar experiences, speaking of attempts to force confessions to war crimes or to recruit members for Russian intelligence services. He told DW that all prisoners were first interrogated and then made certain proposals under duress.
“You can torture people into confessing, but there comes a difficult time when you have to give them a gun,” he said. “That’s why it’s more about psychological pressure and the obligation to voluntarily comply.”
Butkevych confirmed these accounts with his own accounts. But neither veteran ever met anyone willing to join Russian units, they said.
What happens after conscription?
Oliynyk, of the Maksym Kryvonis battalion, said he initially turned down several offers to join Russian forces. He said he only accepted the fourth offer so he could flee.
He claimed he did not sign official Defense Ministry documents, but a private contract with someone offering military services. Then, he said, he was taken to a room where he heard lectures and saw videos and photos that he was then asked to narrate.
Control and mistreatment
Oliynyk said the other servicemen in the Maksym Kryvonis battalion were both those who switched sides of their own free will and those who were forced.
In a video circulating online that appears to be from a trial in Ukraine, he also claims that former Ukrainian prisoners of war in the unit were followed and guarded by mercenaries from the Russian private military company Redut. In the same video, he also speaks of beatings and torture, and of receiving a monthly salary in envelopes distributed by a member of the Russian military intelligence service.
Oliynyk told DW that he was given a phone, but was too afraid to call anyone in Ukraine because the country was under constant surveillance. He denied fighting against the Ukrainians, having fled in March 2025 before his first deployment to Donetsk province. After running across a field, he said he spent two days hiding from drones in basements and homes before coming into contact with Ukrainian fighters.
Oliynyk has now been detained in Ukraine for almost two years while authorities investigate possible betrayal. He has not yet been formally charged.
Sergei Nikitin contributed to this article, originally published in Ukrainian.
Gn world
