Russia has formed a military unit composed of Ukrainian prisoners of war and former Ukrainian servicemembers, raising serious questions about the voluntary nature of their recruitment and the conditions under which they joined.

Pavlo Oliynyk, 25, says he joined the unit to escape Russian captivity. Before his capture in the Donbas region in 2024, he served as a senior lieutenant in Ukraine's armed forces. As a prisoner of war, he says he was electrocuted, beaten, and subjected to psychological torture. When offered the chance to join the Maksym Kryvonis battalion — named after a 17th-century Cossack commander — he accepted, hoping to reach the front lines and escape to Ukrainian-controlled territory.

Reports of Russian combat units consisting of Ukrainian prisoners of war and former Ukrainian servicemembers began emerging in late 2022. Several detachments were initially formed and, in August 2026, were merged into what is called the "Ukrainian Volunteer Special Forces Brigade."

Of the individual units, the Maksym Kryvonis battalion has drawn the most public attention for its apparent participation in combat. Its true size is unknown. Russian media reports claim around 200 fighters, while available footage suggests only several dozen. An investigative team from Ukrainian public broadcaster Suspilne identified over 30 members and confirmed all are former Ukrainian servicemen captured by Russian forces between 2023 and 2024.

Pavel Luzin, an expert on 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 within Ukraine's armed forces consisting of Russian citizens. He describes the formation as an attempt by Moscow to distract from the existence of those pro-Ukrainian Russian units.

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," said Yevhen Shybalov, author and veteran of the war in Ukraine. He added that Russian forces have never tried to conceal that the existence of Russian volunteer units in Ukrainian ranks was the primary motivation for creating Ukrainian units within Russian ranks.

The question of how voluntary the recruitment truly is remains deeply contested. In 2025, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported that 95 percent of released Ukrainian prisoners of war interviewed said they had experienced torture or ill-treatment during Russian captivity.

Bill Wiley, executive director of the NGO Commission for International Justice and Accountability, said the physical and psychological condition of returned combatants raises serious doubts that their enlistment was genuinely voluntary.

Mykhailo Savva of the Center for Civil Liberties, a Kyiv-based human rights organization, pointed to criminal proceedings against several battalion members as an indication that some had switched sides of their own accord.

War veteran and human rights activist Maksym Butkevych, who spent 28 months as a prisoner of war, said the conditions in Russian captivity make the line between voluntary and involuntary recruitment difficult to draw. He acknowledged that while constant pressure was a defining feature of captivity, it was not implausible that some prisoners defected out of ideological conviction.

Butkevych told reporters that between 2022 and 2023, all Ukrainian prisoners of war received offers — "more or less persistently" — to join the Russian army. In his own case, the offers came after severe mistreatment. "They showed us they could do anything they wanted to us," he said, "which was why we should agree to everything."

Shybalov described similar experiences, recounting attempts to force confessions of war crimes and to recruit prisoners into Russian intelligence services. He said all prisoners were first interrogated and then presented with propositions under duress. "You can torture people to get them to confess, but there comes the difficult moment when you need to give them a weapon," he said. "That's why it's more about psychological pressure, and forcing voluntary compliance."