Pavlo Oliynyk, 25, says he joined enemy forces to escape Russian captivity. Before his capture in the Donbas region in 2024, he was a senior lieutenant for Ukraine's 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 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.
Reports of Russian combat units consisting of Ukrainian prisoners of war and former servicemembers 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." Of 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 — Russian media reports claim about 200 fighters while available footage only suggests several dozen.
An investigative team of the Ukrainian public broadcaster Suspilne has identified over 30 members and confirmed they are all former Ukrainian servicemen, captured by Russian forces between 2023 and 2024. Pavel Luzin, an expert for Russian foreign policy and defense at the Center for European Policy Analysis, believes these units are an "imitation" of the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Freedom of Russia Legion — units in the Ukrainian armed forces, consisting of 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 would fight on Ukraine's side, but Ukrainians won't fight on Russia's side," Yevhen Shybalov, author and veteran of the war in Ukraine, tells DW. He adds that 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 owns ranks. In 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.
Bill Wiley, executive director of the NGO Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), says that 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, points to the criminal procedures running against several of the battalion members, which he says indicates that these suggest the combatants had switched sides voluntarily. But where to draw the line between voluntary and involuntary recruitment?
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