The secret channel Russia and Ukraine use to trade prisoners of war

Mint

3 days ago

KYIV, Ukraine—Europe's largest wave of prisoner exchanges since the wake of World War II was set in motion when a Ukrainian soldier reached into the pocket of a dead Russian officer and found a phone.
The device landed in the hands of Brig. Gen. Dmytro Usov, a deputy to the head of Ukraine's HUR military intelligence service, which had just lost two of its men in battles northwest of Kyiv. Russia's invasion of Ukraine was only three weeks old, and the phone presented a way to retrieve their remains.
Usov, a career intelligence officer with a trim gray-streaked beard, scrolled through the deceased's phonebook and pressed 'call" on a contact whose rank suggested this might be a Russian frontline commander.
'Your officer is dead," he told the stunned Russian after introducing himself. He texted a photograph of the corpse, then offered a deal: the bodies of your men for ours.
What followed has evolved into one of the strangest subplots of Europe's biggest war since the 1940s: a series of swaps that started with a few corpses and then slowly escalated into the regular trade of hundreds of captured prisoners, many skeletal and barely clinging to consciousness.
President Vladimir Putin has refused to meet Volodymyr Zelensky unless the Ukrainian president all but concedes defeat, complicating President Trump's peace summit in Alaska on Friday. The two countries, once part of the same Soviet empire, no longer have embassies with each other, and successive peace talks have broken down.
And yet without fanfare, Ukraine and Russia over the course of their war have managed to exchange more than 10,000 combatants across front lines and secure corridors in neighboring Belarus. They include some 1,200 soldiers traded in recent weeks; another 100 young, wounded and ill combatants are due to cross the border on Thursday, Ukrainian officials say.
Despite being snared in conflict and deadlocked at the negotiating table, both sides speak of their shadowy prisoner exchange channel—run directly by military intelligence officers—as efficient and professional. Their transactions mark a striking paradox: two bitter enemies aligned on almost nothing, yet collaborating time and again on one deeply human issue—prisoners of war.
Military historians have puzzled over the relatively smooth logistics and regular pace of these trades, conducted mid-conflict, a pattern virtually unheard of in modern warfare. By contrast, the Soviet Union held onto German POWs for years after World War II. Some weren't freed until 1956. The United States and North Vietnam didn't begin consistent POW releases until 1973, after two decades of American deepening involvement and a long, grinding peace process. Iran and Iraq, whose war ended in 1988, released their last POWs three days before the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq began.
The backstory of how Moscow and Kyiv began trading in a resource they both have—an oversupply of captured men—dates back more than a decade, to the earliest days of Ukraine's violent break from Russia. It hints at a hidden infrastructure that reveals the war is more nuanced than many Americans understand. Mostly, it centers around a tiny handful of military and intelligence officers who now constitute nearly the last thin wire still linking two neighbors that Putin insists are 'one people, a single whole."
Usov, speaking hours before his agency commenced another historic exchange via Belarus in June, put it a different way: 'Despite the fact that we're enemies, that Russia is the aggressor, we have established a certain level of communication," he said. 'It's hard to fight them, and it's hard to negotiate with them. But at the same time, we do it honestly."
Usov used a cellphone found in the pocket of a dead Russian officer to initiate contact with officials on the other side of the war.
To understand how two wartime enemies managed to set aside their differences to retrieve their POWs, The Wall Street Journal spoke to more than a dozen Ukrainian, Russian and European officials, and visited exchange points along the frontline and detention facilities throughout Ukraine. Reporters also spent time in the basement of a military-intelligence office in Kyiv that functions as the nerve center for Ukraine's hunt for soldiers captured by Russia. These sources described trades as a way to ease domestic pressure, demonstrate progress to foreign powers—most recently, the U.S.—and relieve themselves of the burden of feeding and housing thousands of the enemy.
At the center of the web is perhaps the world's top prisoner trader, Vladimir Putin, who last year greenlighted a wide-ranging exchange, freeing a group of dissidents and journalists, including three wrongly held Americans—among them, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich—in return for eight Russian spies, cybercriminals, smugglers and a professional hitman. That trade, on a cordoned off airfield in Turkey, attracted global attention. But it is dwarfed by the lesser-known human commerce underway along the frontlines between Russian and Ukrainian forces.
'If there's a chance to save a human life, returning someone home to their family before hostilities end, and in the process free our own soldiers whom we deeply care about it, then we do it," said Russia's chief negotiator on Ukraine, Vladimir Medinsky, who used a Russian idiom to emphasise that the neighbors remain mortal enemies: 'As we say in Russia, we don't christen our children together."
The seeds of the POW channel were planted more than a decade ago, in the President Hotel in the Belarussian capital of Minsk.
It was 2014 and Ukraine was struggling to reclaim eastern territory seized by Russian-backed militants. Western leaders had pressured its government into talks—to resolve political, economic and cultural disputes.
The negotiators argued over every point, from the spelling of Ukrainian and Russian names to whose troops were shelling where, according to the Swiss diplomat, Tony Frisch, who oversaw the sessions. When he tried to coax the parties to socialize during lunch breaks or have evening drinks at the hotel bar to build a rapport, he was sternly rebuffed.
Several times, Viktor Medvedchuk, the head of a minor pro-Kremlin Ukrainian party who was supposed to be negotiating for Kyiv, made a surprising announcement: He needed to fly to Moscow, to seek guidance from 'a man with five letters in his name."
When he returned, it was clear Putin wanted to make a trade, and the stage was set for a series of small prisoner exchanges from the end of 2014 into the next year. Prisoners crossed through checkpoints on landmine-littered roads, between Ukraine and the Kremlin-backed paramilitaries.
The two sides fell into dysfunctional haggling over whose captives were worth more, as one Russian delegate refused to speak—at all. In the meantime, the Swiss visited paramilitary prisons with the International Committee of the Red Cross, and met Ukrainian captives who recalled being tortured, choked with plastic bags, their children's lives threatened. Ultimately, over the course of about 125 meetings, the two sides managed to trade 600 prisoners: 'I can tell you, it was sometimes like a discussion in a market in Morocco for sheep or cows," said Frisch.
Then, as Russian troops amassed around Ukraine's borders in early 2022, meetings were abruptly canceled. On February 22, 2022, Putin yanked all Russian diplomats from Ukraine, blaming 'provocations" and threats to their lives. That same day, he effectively ended the Minsk process, lamenting a lack of results. Two days later, some 150,000 Russian troops streamed across the border.
Less than a month later, Brig. Gen. Usov was summoned to his boss Kyrylo Budanov's office at HUR's sprawling headquarters: Ukraine's military intelligence agency had no way to contact its counterpart inside Russia.
Old communications lines were shuttered and new attempts were floundering. 'There was no trust. We had battles just outside Kyiv, and we had to convince them to swap people," Budanov said in an interview. 'But we didn't believe each other."
The breakdown rendered the Chinese-made Xiaomi cellphone in Usov's hands an unusually precious channel to re-establish communication between two nations rallying troops into a fight that both claimed was now a war of survival.
Ukrainian Military Intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov said that, early on, 'there was no trust.'
In conversations with the Russians, Usov used his call-sign—Stayer, or marathon-runner—and his real name only sparingly. Trust had to be built painstakingly slowly. He never shared his own number.
Two months into the war, Russia revealed his counterpart: a lieutenant general at Moscow's military intelligence agency, known as the GRU.
In Libya, Gen. Aleksandr Zorin had been Russia's pointman on relations with the pro-Kremlin faction controlling the country's east. He represented Russia in Syrian ceasefire talks with the U.S. in Geneva—and as those talks dragged into the evening, he stepped into the press hall, and delivered pizza to foreign journalists.
Usov found Zorin, who at 56 is his senior by 12 years, frank and straight-talking. Zorin had been born in Soviet Ukraine.
'The way he spoke, and discussed things, corresponded with his general's rank," Usov said. 'He was head and shoulders above the others I had talked with up to that point."
That call with Zorin was the start of a long working relationship that would inspire Usov to embrace a new role as negotiator. Two of his great-grandfathers had died in Nazi captivity and he said he felt duty-bound to ensure Ukrainian servicemen did not repeat their fates.
The two senior spies began to assess one another in more regular calls. Usov was learning on the job, studying the complex mechanics needed to safely engineer an exchange, and seeking advice from Jonathan Powell—now the U.K.'s national security adviser, who had once helped end The Troubles in Northern Ireland.
He read a copy of Zorin's doctoral thesis, which he said recounted negotiating conflicts in the Middle East. 'When I read this, I understood how I might establish a working relationship with him," Usov said. Zorin couldn't be reached for comment and the GRU didn't respond to a request for an interview.
Within a month, Usov was barrelling deep into Russian-held territory to meet Zorin in person in the devastated coastal city of Mariupol, escorted by two Russian Tigr armored vehicles, a white flag fluttering above his car.
The cars wound through streets littered with the corpses of dead civilians. Next to the charred metal and rubble of the port city's steel mill, the Ukrainians stopped to collect one of the commanders of a 2,500-strong garrison of elite Ukrainian fighters who were surrounded inside the plant under constant bombardment to surrender.
That afternoon Usov shook hands with Zorin, who was flanked by four Russian officers, and sat opposite him at a conference room table at a location outside the city, according to a person who was there. The talks dragged on for hours, with both sides fielding calls to their superiors in Kyiv and Moscow. Eventually, Ukraine consented to a surrender: The 2,500 fighters would be taken to Russian prisons.
The question remained of how Ukraine might bring the fighters home.
Kyiv looked for a country that could mediate an exchange, but Switzerland was now on Moscow's 'Unfriendly Countries List," punishment for joining European sanctions. Instead, it turned to the new Switzerlands of the Middle East: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.
On September 21, Turkey brokered the largest swap since Russia's invasion, a choreography that flew five captured Ukrainian commanders to the capital of Ankara while Moscow received Medvedchuk, the pro-Russian politician who had once negotiated in Minsk but had since been arrested for high treason. A separate group of European POWs captured while fighting for Ukraine simultaneously boarded a Saudi jet leaving Russia to find a celebrity businessman there to escort them: Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich.
By now, the two sides had an understanding. The top intelligence officers had met and sized each other up. Foreign governments were standing by to help resolve disputes if necessary. Intelligence chiefs in both countries reported back to superiors in their capitals: This is someone we can work with.
In time, those early exchanges birthed a whole new infrastructure. In a leafy district of Kyiv, near hipster cafes and beauty salons, a nondescript three-story building became HUR's Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners-of-War.
On the top floor, Usov and his HUR subordinates meet regularly in a conference room with the families of POWs who come dressed in T-shirts bearing logos of their son or husband's brigade and often harangue the officials over a lack of results.
In the basement, analysts scour Russian websites and social media feeds for clues about POWs' location and condition. They have compiled a vast database that includes 200 data points about each individual including height, eye color and Russian responses to questions from the Red Cross.
Ukrainians released in swaps have smuggled out lists with the names of comrades in a specific cell. Photos of those lists are compiled in evidence to convince the Russians a particular person is in their captivity.
'To get people back, we have to know who we're fighting for," said Viktoriia Petruk, a 34-year-old who leads the analytics department and spoke for the first time to the media about her work.
Viktoriia Petruk leads a group of HUR analysts who scour websites and social media to feed a database of POWs held by the Russians.
The basement analysts have identified almost 200 detention facilities across Russia and occupied parts of Ukraine where Ukrainian combatants are held often in dire conditions.
Ukraine has five dedicated POW camps, most of them former prisons where the captive Russians earn money sewing, chopping wood, or producing furniture for sale at Ukrainian stores. Kyiv is eager to show Western partners it has moral high ground by treating its prisoners better than Russia.
Logistics have often been fraught. In January 2024, a Russian military plane carrying 65 Ukrainian POWs to a prisoner swap was shot down near the border, a move Moscow blamed on Kyiv, which hasn't taken responsibility for it. During a lull in swaps, and facing political protests from prisoners' relatives, HUR concocted several long-shot schemes to speed things up: offering convicted pro-Russian collaborators and even the bones of long-buried Russian spies for exchange.
Russia didn't take the bait. But when peace talks stalled in Istanbul this Spring, both countries consented to another round, this time bigger than ever before.
On a sunny recent morning, Usov again headed north from Kyiv to greet a fresh cohort of hundreds of exchanged Ukrainian soldiers. Injured men limped and staggered up to the general to thank him, then asked a question: when would be the next round of prisoner trades that might bring their brothers-in-arms home?
Write to Matthew Luxmoore at [e-mail], Drew Hinshaw at [e-mail] and Joe Parkinson at [e-mail]