What matters to us is not your quality, but your quantity. If anything goes wrong – one step to the right, one step to the left – we will shoot to kill. I don’t care if you get there alive or dead. I just want to make a report.
Unidentified Russian convoy officer, during the loading of prisoners at Hola Prystan colony no. 7, Kherson, early November 2022
The European Prison Litigation Network, Protection for Prisoners of Ukraine and the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group submitted a formal communication to the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) calling for an investigation into the deportation, in November 2022, and unlawful detention of Ukrainian civilian pre-conflict prisoners from Kherson and Mykolaiv oblasts.
This communication is the result of nearly three and a half years of work, involving the identification and tracing of victims, logistical support for their repatriation, documentation of the ill-treatment they suffered, and support throughout the legal proceedings. It is based on more than 400 interviews conducted with people repatriated through our programme.
read our submission / Прочитайте повідомлення
KEY FIGURES
- Around 1,800 prisoners were forcibly deported to Russia in November 2022, including almost the entire prison population of Kherson oblast.
- At least 8 prisoners are reported to have died during transfer, in detention in Russia or while returning to Ukraine
- Thanks to the intervention of our organisations, around 500 deportees have been able to leave Russian territory, including around 400 who have returned to Ukraine.
- It is estimated that between 300 and 450 people detainees deported from Kherson continue to be detained within the Russian penitentiary system. Around thirty others are being held in immigration detention centres after the expiry of prison terms appointed by the Ukrainian courts.
Context
In November 2022, when Russian forces withdrew from the city of Kherson and the right-bank areas of Kherson and Mykolaiv Oblasts, they took convicted Ukrainian prisoners with them. In the days before the retreat, the Russian Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), military units, and special operations forces rounded up approximately 1,800 prisoners serving sentences in these oblasts. All of them had been convicted by Ukrainian courts before the invasion and had no connection to the war. They were loaded into overcrowded vans – without water, food, or access to toilets – and driven first to Crimea and then across the Kerch Bridge into Russia, into penal colonies in Krasnodar, Rostov, Volgograd and other regions. Prisoners suffering from tuberculosis were transported alongside healthy inmates. Life-sentenced prisoners were transported last, handcuffed and lying face-down on van floors.
This deportation did not take place in isolation. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine documented that, throughout the period of Russia’s full-scale invasion, the Russian forces carried out widespread transfers of civilians, from occupied parts of Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kherson, Kyiv, Odesa and Zaporizhzhia regions to the Russian Federation. [1] The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) further documented that these measures, enforced through threats, detention, torture and ill-treatment, were “widespread and systematic” and “deprived civilians of any genuine choice” to remain in occupied territory. [2] The deportation of Ukrainian prisoners from Kherson and Mykolaiv was part of this broader pattern: a systematic policy of removing civilians from occupied Ukrainian territory, of which convicted prisoners, invisible, immobile, and wholly in the hands of their captors, were among the most defenceless victims.
The prisoners were never told where they were going. They were beaten at every transit point: at Hola Prystan colony (Kherson oblast), at Simferopol’s SIZO-2 (Crimea), and upon arrival at Russian penal colonies in the Krasnodar, Volgograd, and Rostov regions. Once in Russia, they were detained without any lawful basis and denied legal assistance, dispersed across at least a dozen correctional colonies and forbidden from contacting relatives. Some were pressured to accept Russian citizenship or to sing Russia’s national anthem. Through a law adopted in July 2023, more than six months after the deportation took place, Russia retroactively extended its criminal jurisdiction over occupied Ukrainian territory. Following this law, Russian courts began converting Ukrainian sentences into Russian ones
When their sentences expired, many prisoners were immediately re-arrested on charges of illegal immigration. Stranded in migrant detention centres, denied medical treatment (including for those of them living with HIV), unable to access courts, they faced an impossible choice: accept a Russian passport and go home, or remain detained for an undetermined period.
OUR SUBMISSION
Based, among other sources, on the collection and analysis of more than 400 interviews with direct victims of the acts in question, conducted by our organisations in the framework of a joint project with DIGNITY, in the communication submitted today to the ICC Office of the Prosecutor, we argue that those acts constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.
War crimeS and crimeS against humanity
Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, convicted prisoners serving sentences in occupied territory are protected persons – civilians entitled to the full protections of international humanitarian law. Article 76 further requires that convicted persons serve their sentences on the territory of the occupied state. In addition, prisoners remain protected by international human rights law despite the situation of occupation. International armed conflicts, including occupations, do not displace human rights law; rather, the relevant provisions of IHL and IHRL apply concurrently.
Arbitrary detention
First, our organisations submit that the prisoners’ detention became arbitrary when Russian forces seized control of the prisons and replaced Ukrainian law with a coercive occupation regime. What followed was no longer the execution of Ukrainian court sentences, but a form of detention severed from the legal framework and purposes of punishment under Ukrainian law.
War crimes
Second, the movement of prisoners that took place in November 2022 amounts to forced deportations or transfers, which are prohibited under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and therefore constitute war crimes.
The UN Human Rights Committee’s findings in Bratsylo and Others v. Russia (2024) are directly relevant here. Examining an identical exercise carried out in Crimea, the Committee concluded that Russia had no legal basis whatsoever to prosecute or enforce sentences against individuals convicted by Ukrainian courts for acts committed on Ukrainian territory: Russian criminal law was not in force in that territory at the time the offences were committed, and no international agreement authorised Russia to assume jurisdiction. The same conclusion applies with full force to the prisoners deported from Kherson and Mykolaiv. Russia’s 2023 law did not cure this jurisdictional defect – it merely attempted to paper over it.
Furthermore, the displacement could not be characterised as an evacuation permitted under international humanitarian law: the Russian authorities never established the existence of imperative reasons relating to the security of the population or military necessity, nor did they organise the prisoners’ return as soon as circumstances allowed. On the contrary, the prisoners were transferred outside the occupied territory to remote penal colonies in Russia, without consent, without legal basis, and in an atmosphere of violence, threats and terror. These elements, and the obstacles placed in the way of their return, exclude any characterisation of the operation as a lawful evacuation under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
This deportation therefore amounts to a war crime because it involved the unlawful removal of protected civilians from occupied Ukrainian territory to Russia, which was carried out under Russian military occupation, by Russian forces and occupation authorities, in the context of the retreat from Kherson, and was inseparable from the ongoing international armed conflict.
Crimes against humanity
Third, this deportation amounts to a crime against humanity. As set out above, the deportation of approximately 1,800 prisoners was not an isolated incident: it was part of a widespread and systematic campaign of forced displacement targeting Ukrainian civilians across occupied territory – documented by the United Nations, the OSCE Moscow Mechanism, and the European Court of Human Rights – forming a pattern extending across multiple occupied oblasts over the entire period of the full-scale invasion.
When individual criminal acts form part of such a systematic attack against a civilian population they reach the threshold of crimes against humanity under Article 7 of the Rome Statute, specifically deportation of population (Article 7(1)(d)) and imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty (Article 7(1)(e)).
Seven officials identified as responsible
The intentionality of the operation is evidenced by its organised and large-scale character, the involvement of central FSIN structures and convoy units, the authorities’ clear knowledge of the victims’ status as Ukrainian civilian prisoners, the absence of any lawful basis for their removal and continued detention, and the subsequent attempts to regularise the situation ex post facto. These elements demonstrate that the deportation and confinement were deliberate acts, not incidental consequences of the military situation.
On the basis of our analysis of the events as reconstructed from victims’ testimonies and findings of the Ukrainian authorities, we identify seven senior Russian federal officials, including Russia’s Minister of Justice and the Director of the FSIN, as bearing individual responsibility for ordering, enabling and executing these acts. While Ukraine is investigating the crimes committed on its territory, it cannot reach the officials who ordered the deportation and address their conduct in its entirety – this national investigation is limited to the former officials of the Ukraine penitentiary service.
FOOTNOTES
[1] OHCHR, Report on the Human Rights Situation in Ukraine, 1 August 2022 – 31 January 2023 (35th Periodic Report, 24 March 2023), paras. 63–66.
[2] OHCHR, Forced Displacement from Territory of Ukraine Occupied by the Russian Federation: Forcible Transfer and Deportation, Barriers to Return, and the Rights of Internally Displaced Persons, 24 February 2022 – 31 December 2025 (20 March 2026), paras. 2, 29.
This submission was prepared with the financial support of the Fondation de France. Views and opinions expressed are those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the Fondation de France
