Families of Ukraine's missing fear peace will not bring them home

Tatyana Popovytch had ed every agency she could think of. She had walked every step her son Vladislav could have taken after the Russians opened fire at his car, leaving him to flee with a bullet in his leg. She had looked in mass graves, reviewed pictures of the dead, watched exhumations. And after a month, she knew no more than when she had started.

Then a stranger called.

Serhii had just been released from a Russian prison in Kursk. At morning roll call, the prisoners could not see one another, but they could hear each person state their full name and home village. Serhii memorised as many names and places as he could – 10 in total, he said – and on 9 May 2022 he called Tatyana to say that he had heard her son's voice.

Like Vladislav, Serhii was a civilian captured from Bucha at the start of the war, when hundreds of civilians were taken from this area. Vladislav was 29 at the time. Now 32, he is still in the prison in Kursk. Serhii couldn't explain to Tatyana why he had been released and Vladislav hadn't. Tatyana was just glad to hear that her son was alive. "I was so overjoyed I lost the stutter I'd had since he was taken," she said.

Three years later, to the day, Tatyana was sitting in a café in Bucha, not far from where her son was abducted, looking over the scant evidence that he was still alive: two letters from him – short, boilerplate texts, written in Russian, telling her he was well fed and well looked after. Each letter had taken around three months to reach Tatyana, making it hard for her to feel very connected to her son at any point in time.

"My son is very gentle and sensitive," she said, with the pained expression of a parent who cannot protect their child. She was looking at pictures of Vlad ballroom dancing – a hobby from a young age. "He is so vulnerable," she said. "I worry that he will lose his sanity there."

According to Ukrainian authorities, nearly 16,000 Ukrainian civilians are still in captivity in Russian prisons after being abducted by the invading army – not counting the more than 20,000 Ukrainian children estimated to have been taken to Russia.

There are growing fears now among their many thousands of loved ones, amid the apparent progress towards peace talks, that they could be forgotten or lost in the process. And those fears appear to be justified.

Under the Geneva Convention, there is a recognised mechanism for exchanging prisoners of war, but no such mechanism exists for the return of captured civilians, leaving even top Ukrainian and international officials searching for an explanation as to how they might be brought home.

"When I attend official meetings, at the ombudsman's office or elsewhere, no one talks about getting the civilians back in the event of a ceasefire," said Yulia Hripun, 23, whose father was kidnapped early on in the war from a village just west of Kyiv.

In the weeks after learning of her father's captivity, Yulia used Facebook to another daughter of an imprisoned Ukrainian and the pair launched a new organisation to campaign for all the civilians' release.

The group has met representatives from the UN, the European Parliament, the governments of several EU countries and the US embassy in Ukraine.

"We spoke with them but it came down to the fact that they honestly don't understand what's going to happen," Yulia said, of meeting the Americans.

"The only thing they said is that Trump is interested in the issue of deported children and that maybe civilians could somehow fit into that category. But they are actually different categories that can't be combined."

Worryingly for Yulia and other relatives of the captured civilians, top Ukrainian officials are not pretending to have a stronger idea.

"I do not see the real, effective approach to returning the civilian detainees to Ukraine," said Dmytro Lubinets, the country's human rights ombudsman. "We do not have a legal basis or the mechanisms for returning them," he said, frankly.

Further complicating the problem is Russia levelling criminal charges against some of those captured during the invasion.

"And when you see these charges, it is often 'actions against the special military operation'," Lubinets said. "Can you imagine opening an investigation against a Ukrainian civilian for simply resisting the invading Russian army, on Ukrainian territory":[]}