Returning Russian POWs pay heavy price for choosing surrender over death

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. When a self-described patriotic, middle-aged Russian soldier was released from a prisoner-of-war camp in Ukraine earlier this year, he called his family to tell them he was alive, free and back on Russian soil. As the phone was passed around, he told them he might be back in time for his son’s birthday in a few weeks’ time.

He never made it. Instead, he was subjected to weeks of questioning by Russia’s security services—then sent back to the front. Soon he went missing again on the front lines near the occupied Ukrainian city of Donetsk.

This time, his relatives fear he is dead. One likened the situation to being caught in a circle of hell. Across Russian towns and cities, authorities have celebrated the patriotism of volunteers who sign up to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war.

Veterans who return from the front are sometimes lionized on television and promised privileged positions in the local and regional governments of an increasingly militarized Russia. But the fate of Russia’s POWs has been an overlooked chapter of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Before soldiers are even sent to the front, their commanders admonish them to blow themselves up with a grenade before submitting to Ukrainian capture.

Russian rapper Dmitry Kuznetsov, known as Husky, shared the sentiment in his new album. “I won’t be taken prisoner, in my left hand a grenade, in my right, a grenade," he rapped on one track. POWs and their families say the joy of coming home is short-lived.

Those who choose to surrender face a return fraught with suspicion and shame. Salaries and one-time bonuses were a chief reason why so many agreed to go to war, but they can be cut off as soon as they are captured. Thousands are now