After Joining Russia’s War, Central Asians Captured By Kyiv Are In Limbo

Last month, Russia and Ukraine exchanged 25 prisoners of war each, the first of two exchanges this year so far and one of dozens since the war began.

Most of the soldiers involved in the swap had suffered serious injuries.

Among them was an Uzbek who appeared in a video published by the Ukrainian side on January 15.

The man said he had spent a year and three months in Ukrainian captivity after losing an arm and injuring a leg while fighting for the Russian military.

“As I was leaving, my neighbor was upset,” the man said in the video. “He said: ‘They’re taking you, but not me, and I’ve been here longer than you.’ I told him that everything has its time. I also waited a long time and cried many nights, wanting to return to my children,” the man recalled.

For the more than 50 Central Asians Ukraine says it has captured, the burning question is when their time will come.

On the one hand, after stalling in the second half of 2023, prisoner swaps between Russia and Ukraine are now taking place regularly again, sometimes involving hundreds of people at a time, as the war approaches its fourth year.

But the Central Asian prisoners of war still have no way of knowing where they fit into these complicated negotiations.

Nor do they know whether their Central Asian governments, which are close to Russia but have warned citizens they face jail time for participating in the conflict, might try to intervene on their behalf.

RFE/RL journalists have interviewed former prisoners of war, their relatives, and Ukrainian civilian and military officials with knowledge of the captives to try to build a clearer picture of the situation.

Thrown Into ‘Intense Battles’

As with so many issues, Moscow and Kyiv are not in agreement when it comes to the chances of prisoners of war who are not ethnic Russians or Russian citizens getting equal treatment from the Kremlin when it negotiates for the swaps.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in November that Moscow seeks the return of all prisoners of war captured in Ukraine “regardless of their religion, nationality, or affiliation with a military unit.”

But Bohdan Okhrimenko, head of the secretariat at Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, told RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service this month that Russia gives priority to “its own citizens, especially from the European part of the country, Moscow, and St. Petersburg.”

Okhrimenko noted that Central Asians captured by Ukrainian forces had been deployed on the front lines of “the most intense battles” in Ukraine such as Bakhmut, Avdiyivka, and Pokrovsk, as well as in Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukraine launched a shock offensive in August.

News of Ukraine’s capture of another Uzbek national, who was fighting for Russia in the southern Zaporizhzhya region, came in December.

It was initially posted on the social media of a Ukrainian brigade called Spartan.

In an interview with RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service this year, Artem Sholudko, an officer with the brigade, described the Uzbek man as the sole survivor in a detachment of four soldiers sent to attack Ukrainian positions without communications equipment.

Sholudko said the man had worked in a restaurant before taking a job as a cook in a Russian military unit.

After that, the Russian command placed him in an assault unit, the officer claimed.

Out The Other Side

Okhrimenko told RFE/RL that of the 54 Central Asians Ukraine is holding he believes 14 are Uzbeks, 21 are Kazakhs, 18 are Tajiks, and only one is Kyrgyz.

Many of the captives had Russian passports, the Ukrainian official confirmed, making determining their nationality complicated.

Tajikistan, for instance, has an agreement with Russia on dual citizenship, while Kyrgyzstan allows its citizens to hold two passports in practice.

Uzbekistan, however, does not recognize its citizens’ other passports, and exiting Uzbek citizenship is a laborious process. Kazakh law does not allow for dual nationality either.

Okhrimenko noted that only six of the 21 “Kazakhs” were Kazakh citizens, with the remainder citizens of Russia.

Ukrainian authorities have so far refused to disclose how many Central Asian prisoners of war have already been freed by Kyiv.

But RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service was earlier this month able to contact one Kyrgyz citizen, a dual Kyrgyz-Russian national and a self-described ethnic Russian, nearly three years after he was freed by Ukraine in a prisoner swap that involved 86 people on each side.

This man, now 27, was held for just over a month after his capture in Ukraine’s northeastern Sumy region and has since returned to civilian life in Russia.

In an interview in which he requested anonymity, the man born in the southern Kyrgyz city of Osh said conditions in the Ukrainian prisoners of war camp were “like a prison” but added he was not treated badly.

He acknowledged willingly signing a contract with the Russian Army but said he expected to be serving in a nonmilitary capacity.

“I was probably lucky. Some were in captivity for a year or two,” he added, listing “Russians, Tatars, Bashkirs, [and] Tuvans” from Russia among his fellow captives, but no Central Asians.

The name of another Kyrgyzstan-born man who was released quickly after his capture is widely known.

Alisher Tursunov’s relatives were completely shocked when his video appeared on the Ukrainian-run Telegram channel Prisoners of the Special Military Operation, where he described his ordeal and appealed to Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov to save himself.

Tursunov — 56 when he was captured — said he had traveled to the Russian city of Ryazan to visit his son in May 2024 as massive detentions of Central Asian migrants were still ongoing in the aftermath of a terrorist attack at a concert hall outside Moscow two months earlier.

There he was arrested, beaten by police, and forced to sign a contract to serve in the Russian military, he said.

At the front, he was forced to fire a grenade launcher and dig trenches.

Tursunov said he used the first opportunity to surrender to Ukrainian forces.

When prisoners of war appear in videos, it is typically unclear whether they are doing so voluntarily or under duress. There is also no guarantee they are telling the truth about their service or motivations.

But there have been plenty of reports of Central Asians being tricked or coerced into Russian military service since the war began.

Tursunov’s video appeal therefore resonated strongly in Kyrgyz society, likely contributing to him being included in a July 17 prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine.

“He’s not a person that could go to a foreign country to kill people. He’s a pensioner. It doesn’t make any sense,” his brother Ulugbek Tursunov told RFE/RL at the time the video first appeared.

RFE/RL was unable to reach Tursunov for an interview following his release.