The wall. How rights defenders help Ukrainians search for relatives held in Russian captivity—and how the state gets in the way

In 2025, following amendments to the law “On the procedure for considering citizens’ appeals”, Russian ministries and state institutions began, one after another, to require anyone submitting a request online to log in through Gosuslugi, the state services portal. The change proved a nightmare for some very unexpected groups of people who, for one reason or another, are locked out of the monopoly platform.

Like Ukrainians whose relatives have been taken prisoner by Russia. They can no longer send FSIN, the penitentiary service, a query asking which pre-trial detention centre or prison their loved ones are being held in. At least several hundred families have been affected, say the rights defenders who trace prisoners of war.

It is still possible, in principle, to write to individual FSIN facilities the old-fashioned way, by email. But that route has two problems. First, as several rights defenders point out, it requires setting up an email account in the .ru domain, circumventing Ukraine’s own ban on Russian mail services, because Russian state bodies now rarely reply to messages sent from foreign addresses. Second, Ukrainians are held in detention centres and prisons all across Russia, and there is no way of knowing which one to write to.

“There’s no system at all, they’re scattered across the whole of Russia. There are only a handful of prisons, but the maximum-security colonies are everywhere, and there’s no clear pattern of allocation. Someone will say he’s the first captive to arrive there. It’s like some sort of Sorting Hat deciding whether you’ll be freezing in Yakutia [in Siberia] or feeding mosquitoes in Karelia [in the North]," says Elena Bazanova, a lawyer who helps trace captives.

In February, the Central District Military Court sentenced nine Ukrainian prisoners of war in the space of a week, at off-site hearings in Saransk. Not one region bordering Ukraine falls within that court’s jurisdiction, and the court itself sits in Yekaterinburg. Mediazona worked out where the hearings had taken place only by googling the names of the defence lawyers listed on the court’s website: all of them, it turned out, practise in Mordovia.

It is not likely that the relatives of any of the nine, with no further details, would have thought to write to a detention centre in Mordovia and enquire about the fate of their husband, son or brother.

Before the Gosuslugi requirement came in, the rights project Skvoz Stenu (“Through the Wall”) used to send out requests to every region at once. “The moment someone filled in the form, queries went out immediately to all the regional FSIN directorates. It’s possible, of course, that we overloaded the system by doing that,” admits its founder, Anastasia Shevchenko.

Several other rights defenders agree that such blanket mailings were conspicuous and may well have irritated the security services.

Shevchenko adds that this approach was not especially productive in any case. The replies from regional FSIN offices, she says, were usually “incoherent nonsense: either they cited the protection of personal data, or the absence of the person’s own consent, or they said it wasn’t their job, it was the Defence ministry’s.”

“It’s like a sine graph: sometimes they answer, sometimes they stop”

Bazanova recalls that she used to tell families that if Russia had opened a criminal case against a Ukrainian soldier, that was, in a way, good news: at least he then had some kind of legal status.

Bazanova showed Mediazona several replies from different agencies to lawyers’ formal requests about the fate of captives. In one, FSIN writes that the prisoner himself “declined to provide information to anyone” about his whereabouts. In another, the service maintains that it keeps no centralised register of prisoners, and suggests approaching the Interior ministry. The Interior ministry, in turn, replies that it releases such information only in response to “personal applications from the citizens whom it concerns, or from their legal representatives holding a power of attorney drawn up in accordance with the legislation of the Russian Federation”.

Verkhneuralsk prison in Chelyabinsk region, approached by the relatives of one Ukrainian captive, replied by noting that the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership between Russia and Ukraine had lapsed, and that in February 2022 Ukraine’s president announced the severing of diplomatic relations.

“It should be noted that, pursuant to the instruction of FSIN of Russia dated April 11, 2023, and in connection with recommendations from the Russian Foreign ministry, information concerning the arrival of Ukrainian citizens at correctional institutions to serve sentences is not to be provided to the diplomatic missions of Ukraine in the Russian Federation,” the prison administration concluded, adding that the Russian law on the handling of appeals does not extend to letters from Ukrainians.

That is not the only instance of the prison service invoking the rupture in diplomatic relations when asked where a captive is held, Bazanova says. Correspondence between Ukrainians and FSIN has become so difficult that one member of staff at Rus Sidyaschaya, a Russian prisoners’ rights group, seriously regards it as a form of discrimination.

“The reasoning goes: our diplomatic relations are severed, and therefore the guarantees of the law on the handling of appeals don’t extend to Ukrainian citizens—which is, of course, complete nonsense. But I can’t say it’s a universal practice,” says lawyer Alexander Arsenyev.

Another lawyer, Pyotr Troyekurov, says he sent four requests to FSIN’s central office: in two cases he was told where the Ukrainians were, in the other two he was told that no centralised register is kept. The Rus Sidyaschaya staffer recalls the reverse: a family sent their request directly to a penal colony, and the answer came back from the central office.

Anna Karetnikova, a rights defender who worked as a lead analyst at FSIN’s Moscow directorate, says centralised records certainly are kept, and in exhaustive detail.

“At the Moscow directorate they knew about every single person, the figures went into the morning summary every day, and I imagine the same thing happens at headquarters,” she says. “An officer only had to ring the records unit at the regional directorate to find out where any given detainee was—or, if he’d been put on a transport convoy, the point he was heading for, the intermediate one. But FSIN always knows the final destination too.”

One of the relatively reliable approaches is to have a lawyer send a formal request not to FSIN’s central office but to a regional directorate. That works in cases where there is at least some indication of where the captive might be.

“Through the Wall” reports that informative replies from the regions have become rarer of late; two other rights defenders have not noticed that trend.

“It’s all like a sine graph: sometimes they answer, sometimes they stop,” says Vladimir Zhbankov, a lawyer with the Ukrainian humanitarian initiative Poshuk.Polon (“Search. Captivity”). In his experience, how forthcoming a regional FSIN office is depends on geography: the further from Moscow and the western border, the better.

The Belgorod region directorate, for example, has gone so far as to publish a notice on its website stating that detainees’ whereabouts are disclosed to third parties “solely with the written consent of the convicted person”.

Arsenyev and Zhbankov add that while a case is still at the investigation stage, the investigating body (if it can be identified) may in theory inform the family; after that, the prosecutor’s office may.

Arsenyev offers one further workaround: a Ukrainian who has vanished can be reported missing to the Russian police. He immediately adds, though, that the police are “not exactly keen to declare everyone missing”, so it helps to arrive armed with documents showing that attempts to find the person have already failed.

“We’ve had successes where a decision came back—a refusal to open a criminal case, say—which stated that the person had been found and was in such-and-such place,” he says. “Sometimes they even attached, as evidence, letters from those people saying everything was fine, I’ve been interviewed, please call off the search. Or they might, again not strictly by the book, let slip fragments of information: fingerprints were taken at this place on this date. You get a lead, and from there you can pull on the thread and make enquiries on the ground.”

Courts and prisons

Criminal cases reach court sooner or later. Most captives are tried at the Southern District Military Court in Rostov-on-Don and at the 2nd Western District Military Court. The latter sits in Moscow but hears cases against Ukrainian soldiers captured in the Kursk region by video link or at off-site sessions.

“In Rostov the proceedings drag on for a very long time, and there you can still get through somehow. The Western court judges fast and unfairly—they can hand down an enormous sentence in three hearings,” Zhbankov says.

In theory, defendants’ names ought to appear in the courts’ public case databases. In practice it is not that simple. In December 2024, Mediazona noticed that the 2nd Western District Military Court had, without explanation, concealed on its website the names of Ukrainian servicemen charged under “terrorism” articles. In the spring of 2026 the Southern District Military Court followed suit, selectively: in some cases the names of Ukrainian defendants remain accessible, in others they do not. On top of that, a substantial volume of cases against prisoners of war and civilian hostages goes to courts in the occupied territories, which only began populating their databases at the end of 2024—and not everywhere even then. All of this makes tracing captives far harder.

“The whole system is set up wrong,” Bazanova says.

Often, which court heard a case becomes known only after the fact, from a press release about the verdict. But even that counts as serious progress. Once a sentence has been passed and the convict transferred, FSIN is supposed to send the court a document stating where he is serving it, though that can take several months. If the family retains a lawyer, he can inspect the document and find out where the man was sent.

Zhbankov cautions that the method does not always work: “By the time the press release comes out, by the time you’ve written your request, the person could have been moved anywhere, and the court can drag its feet over granting access to the case file, it’s simply slow.” Arsenyev adds that the paperwork on place of imprisonment is sometimes never sent to the court at all.

“There’s a risk of sending a lawyer to court for nothing. That can be expensive. And if these are courts in the occupied territories, which is more expensive and more troublesome again, they may have their own unwritten rules. Access of that sort can cost 25,000 to 50,000 roubles. It’s worth trying if you have the money and an understanding of how it needs to be done,” he says.

The search is made marginally easier by the fact that most cases against Ukrainians pass through Russia’s only military court of appeal, at Vlasikha outside Moscow: if a captive decides to appeal, he will surface there eventually, albeit by video link rather than in person.

For those convicted under “terrorism” and “espionage” articles, Russian courts as a rule impose several years in prison proper, followed by transfer to a penal colony. Prison conditions are always harsher, but Russia’s penitentiary system contains only eight such prisons, one of which, Zhbankov notes, is used as a transit facility. That occasionally makes it possible to locate a prisoner by elimination.

“At a certain point it became clear they were being held at Vladimir Central, Dimitrovgrad or Minusinsk, and I started advising families to write to those three regions first. They’d write saying this is his mother, she’s looking for her son, attach some document or other—and they’d get a perfectly calm reply,” the Rus Sidyaschaya staffer recalls.

There are many penal colonies, but rights defenders have learned to navigate those too.

“The current trend is for Azov fighters to be sent to Siberia: Buryatia, Yakutia, Krasnoyarsk region. But they go to strict-regime colonies for first-time offenders. There are 44 colonies in Krasnoyarsk region alone, but you can narrow the search radius and send letters to those. It’s hard going and it takes a lot of time,” says Shevchenko.

The most unpredictable and absurd phase of the whole ordeal, jokes Zhbankov, is the etap, the prison transport convoy. Routes can be plotted so eccentrically that a convict “manages to clock up the circumference of the earth in kilometers”.

“FSIN’s routes are uncharted territory. A man can be assigned to Mordovia but taken from Rostov across the whole of Russia: Minusinsk [in Siberia], Arkhangelsk [in the North], Kursk [in the West, near Ukraine border]. The routes are utterly insane, impossible to predict. Which means the only way to get information is from other prisoners. There have been several cases where a lawyer managed to get in to see one Ukrainian, and he told them who was being held alongside him,” adds Troyekurov.

Letters and visits

Russian law guarantees both remand prisoners and convicts the right to correspondence. If Ukrainians in detention centres and colonies could simply write to the outside world saying where they were, the problem of finding them would not exist; yet, it does.

“Here’s the pattern: a person is in a detention centre, he’s surfaced for the first time in four years, and then they freeze his correspondence, and in that window they can convict him. There was a case where a man got 18 years in a single hearing. Sometimes they didn’t like something in a letter, and that’s it, frozen for a month. He isn’t given the letters that arrive, and the letters he writes are taken away and never sent, so that he feels he’s been forgotten. For them, that’s the most frightening thing of all,” Shevchenko explains.

Online services for writing to prisoners can help with the search: if the addressee is not at the facility, some of them (F-Pismo, for instance) notify the sender. But such services operate in only a fraction of FSIN facilities, and by Shevchenko’s observation, Azov fighters are frequently sent to precisely those institutions that are not yet connected.

That leaves writing to the prison administration directly. The wife of a Ukrainian captured in the Kursk region tells Mediazona that she established by elimination that her husband was being held at Verkhneuralsk. “We got a reply from there saying they couldn’t tell us [where he was] because of the foreign ministry’s recommendations. Money we send him isn’t returned, but they won’t let a lawyer in either,” she says.

Another Ukrainian woman searching for her captured husband says she wrote to every prison in Russia and heard back from just one, which cited the severing of diplomatic relations. “Ten people write to the same prison and get ten different answers,” she says.

That money transfer, incidentally, is itself a working method: if a payment into a prisoner’s account is not bounced back to the sender, the addressee is there.

There is one further technique: monitoring pro-war Telegram channels on social media, which like to post “interviews” with captives. Shevchenko says her foundation has managed to automate the process, partly by using facial recognition on photographs. In pursuit of its own aims, Russian propaganda sometimes discloses precisely the data families need: the state broadcaster RT published a list of a thousand people whom Ukraine had supposedly refused to include in exchanges, devoting an entire special project to them.

Finally, once rights defenders have a confident hypothesis about where a captive is being held, a lawyer can go and visit him, but here too, Mediazona’s interviewees say, they are often obstructed.

“I sent requests to the regional office and to FSIN headquarters, and they told me where the Ukrainian was. I travelled to the detention centre, waited several hours, and then an escort officer told me the man had refused to see me. I was surprised: refused, at the very first meeting? I asked them to bring him out: let me hear the refusal from him and I’ll go home. Then they brought me out a statement from this Ukrainian, with his signature, saying he had no need of my assistance,” Troyekurov recalls.

Another lawyer, describing a similar episode, adds that the Ukrainian who had supposedly “declined” his services was at the same time smuggling letters out to his family asking to meet a defence lawyer.

On one occasion, Troyekurov continues, such a refusal was challenged in court and the captive explained by video link that he “saw no point” in having a lawyer.

Ukrainians in Russian custody understandably try not to give their guards any further provocation: they are routinely held in conditions that amount to torture as it is. The wives of two captives from the Kursk region asked Mediazona not to publish their names, for fear of harming their husbands.

Incommunicado

None of the methods described above works for Ukrainians held incommunicado, i.e. in total isolation, with neither correspondence nor lawyers’ visits permitted. That is typically the position of captives who face no criminal charges at all, and of civilians detained for “opposing the special military operation”, the Kremlin’s preferred and enforced term for its invasion of Ukraine. The only source of information about these people is the testimony of other Ukrainians who have made it home in prisoner exchanges.

Among the facilities known to hold prisoners with no defined legal status are Penal Colony No. 10 in Mordovia and the former Penal Colony No. 120 at Olenivka in occupied Donetsk region. Ukrainians released from both have described torture of extreme brutality.

In the summer of 2024, Dmytro Usov, secretary of Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, said there were 186 known sites where prisoners of war and civilian hostages were held, and that torture was used systematically at 29 of them.

“According to [rights defender] Mikhail Savva, FSIN distributes Ukrainians among different camps across Russia so as not to concentrate them in one place and create a ‘potential for resistance’,” the outlet IStories reported.

An Investigative Committee document published by the Pervy Otdel project shows that Vladimir Putin took a “decision” as early as March 8, 2022, providing for extrajudicial detention for “opposing the special military operation”.

Those detained on that basis have no procedural status whatsoever. Russia does not recognise them as prisoners of war, and they can be deprived of their liberty for years without any criminal case being opened or any charges brought.

The Russian authorities routinely reject every accusation of abduction, insisting that they comply fully with international conventions and do not subject Ukrainians to torture, despite abundant evidence to the contrary.

Editor: Dmitry Tkachev