Ukraine's freed civilian captives left without housing or care after release

Since 2014, thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been imprisoned in occupied territories for opposing the occupation or cooperating with Ukrainian services. Ukrainian law labels them people deprived of personal freedom due to armed aggression, though they are commonly known as civilian captives.

After an exchange, released captives typically spend 21 days at regional hospitals in Kyiv, Chernihiv or Sumy, but these only provide diagnostics rather than full rehabilitation. Dental care is a particularly acute problem, since nearly all former captives lose teeth from torture or detention conditions, yet the state offers no free dental programs, leaving costs to charities or the survivors themselves.

Ludmila Yankina, founder of the civic organization Civis Fortis, explains that those who escape Russian prisons on their own must travel through third countries without documents, and once home must "prove with their bare hands" that they were held captive, since evidence is often lacking.

Most civilian captives come from occupied territories where their homes are destroyed or inaccessible. The state's one-time payment — 100,000 hryvnias plus the same amount per year of captivity — does not cover housing for long, and a housing voucher proposal pushed last year by deputy presidential office head Iryna Vereshchuk has still not been implemented.

Ihor Kotelianets, head of an association of relatives of Kremlin political prisoners, says that in 2025, 81% of applicants to the commission determining captivity status were rejected, because the state demands photo or video evidence that occupiers simply do not issue. He notes that nearly 80% of released civilians got out of prison on their own, without any formal exchange, and this group faces the greatest difficulty accessing help.

Commission member Tetiana Katrychenko explains that the law protecting civilian captives predates the full-scale invasion and does not cover the mass detentions that occurred after February 24, 2022.

To address the problem, rights advocates propose creating a National Agency for Civilians Deprived of Personal Freedom, which would maintain a unified registry, take over the commission's work, and coordinate medical and psychological rehabilitation while seeking international donor funding.