Iya Rashevskaya was told her husband — a member of the country’s armed forces – had gone missing in the frontline in the eastern Donetsk region, in April 2023.

The news of Serhiy Skotarenko’s disappearance came just a month after he had joined the military, having given up his job abroad.

Rashevskaya soon found out that her husband, a native of Ukraine’s southeastern Zaporizhzhya region, was alive and being held captive in Chechnya along with several other Ukrainian prisoners of war.

A Ukrainian soldier who was released in a prisoner swap in June 2023 told Rashevskaya that he and Skotarenko had been held in the same jail in Chechnya.

Rashevskaya recalls getting an unexpected, brief video call from her husband in August 2023.

“My husband asked about me and our children. He also asked me to help him to return home, saying we were his only hope,” Rashevskaya said. “He looked awful, he has lost a lot of weight.”

Ukrainian captives in Chechnya “were being held in a basement and survived on instant noodles, bread, and water,” according to Rashevskaya.

Ukrainian authorities estimate that more than 150 Ukrainian POWs are currently being held in Chechnya, a Russian region ruled by authoritarian leader Ramzan Kadyrov.

Kadyrov says the soldiers were captured by Chechen military units fighting alongside other Russian forces in Ukraine.

But Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of POWs has claimed that Chechnya also often “buys” Ukrainian captives from various Russian military units to use them as a bargaining chip in negotiations.

RFE/RL cannot independently verify the claim.

Some of the Ukrainian captives were exchanged with Chechen fighters seized by Ukrainian forces.

Kadyrov, a vocal supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has sent thousands of Chechen fighters to Ukraine since the invasion began three years ago.

In December 2024, Kadyrov threatened to use Ukrainian captives as human shields to protect strategically important buildings in Grozny from Ukrainian drone attacks. He said he would place them on the rooftops of buildings.

He made the statement after Ukrainian drones reportedly hit a police campus in the Chechen capital.

In January 2024, Kadyrov offered to release 20 Ukrainian captives in exchange for the removal of U.S. sanctions against his relatives and horses.

Kadyrov, 48, and several of his family members, including his mother, Aymani Kadyrova, have been sanctioned by the United States and the European Union in recent years.

Kadyrova, 71, is the head of the Kadyrov Foundation, which runs reeducation programs for Ukrainian children abducted by Russian forces from occupied territories. Washington imposed sanctions on Kadyrova and the Foundation in August 2023.

Kadyrov was sanctioned by Washington in 2017 and 2020 over accusations of human rights abuses.

PR campaign for Kadyrov

Chechen human rights lawyer Abubakar Yangulbaev says Kadyrov directly controls any prisoner swaps involving the Ukrainians captives in Chechnya.

“While the Chechens fighting in Ukraine are part of Russian troops, Chechnya also has its own interests. It’s important for Kadyrov to secure the release of the Chechens captured in Ukraine to protect his own reputation before his people, whom he constantly calls to go to fight in Ukraine,” Yangulbaev told RFE/RL.

“It is a PR campaign for Kadyrov,” he added.

Chechnya has never released the exact number or Ukrainian POWs it holds.

According to Maria Klimik, a reporter for the Ukraine-based monitor, Media Initiative for Human Rights, in some cases the Ukrainian and Chechen sides have swapped captured soldiers “informally” in the battlefields in Ukraine without involving a third party.

Klimik told RFE/RL that Ukrainian POWs in Chechnya are usually held in dark, windowless basements of buildings – presumably police stations. Prisoners sleep on utility shelves as there are no beds in the basements, Klimik said citing accounts of former POWs.

RFE/RL cannot independently verify the claims.

In his New Year address, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that 3,956 Ukrainian soldiers had been freed in prisoners’ exchanges between Kyiv and Moscow since the beginning of the invasion.

There has been no public mention of any direct prisoner exchanges between Ukraine and Chechnya, as the families of the captives in Grozny call for their release.