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The Bohdan Khmelnytsky Battalion (also spelled in a Russian form as Bogdan Khmelnitsky Battalion) is a so-called volunteer battalion of Russia composed of Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs). Russian state media has claimed that its members are Ukrainian (POWs) who were "recruited" from Russian penal colonies.
The tsarist government ratified the 1907 Hague Convention, but the Soviet Union had not signed the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War. [2] In 1931 USSR passed the "Statute of POWs" that was roughly similar to the Geneva Convention, although it explicitly outlawed many privileges customarily afforded to military officers.
The first POW camps were formed in the European part of the USSR. By the end of World War II, the Soviet Union amassed a huge number of German and Japanese and other Axis Powers POW, estimated over 5 million [1] (of which estimated 15% died in captivity [2]), as well as interned German civilians used as part of the reparations.
[92] [6] A wounded Russian soldier was seemingly shot twice by a Ukrainian soldier while lying on the ground. Three dead Russian soldiers, including one with a head wound and hands tied behind his back, were shown near the soldier. The video appeared to have been filmed on a road north of the village of Dmytrivka, seven miles south of Bucha. [93]
The Russian paramilitary Wagner Group widely recruited from prisons starting in 2022, growing their forces by an estimated 40,000. [ 2 ] [ 4 ] According to the New York Times, Wagner's prison recruitment campaign began in early July 2022, when Prigozhin personally appeared in prisons around St. Petersburg and offered deals to the prisoners. [ 5 ]
However, some other historians, such as Rolf-Dieter Müller and Gerd R. Ueberschär claimed that almost all returning Soviet POWs were convicted of collaboration and treason and sentenced to the various forms of forced labour, [19] while admitting that it would be unlikely to study the full extent of the history of the Soviet prisoners of war.
Between 6.6–9 million soldiers surrendered and were held in prisoner-of-war camps during World War I. [1] [2]25–31% of Russian losses (as a proportion of those captured, wounded, or killed) were to prisoner status, for Austria-Hungary 32%, for Italy 26%, for France 12%, for Germany 9%; for Britain 7%.
Soviet partisans were members of resistance movements that fought a guerrilla war against Axis forces during World War II in the Soviet Union, the previously Soviet-occupied territories of interwar Poland in 1941–45 and eastern Finland. The activity emerged after Nazi Germany's Operation Barbarossa was launched from mid-1941 on.