People in danger of being left behind by a peace deal

In the face of overwhelming media attention on the machinations of Trump and his overtures to a peace deal with Putin, it is easy to forget that there are many more lives at stake than those of world leaders and soldiers.

In addition to prisoners of war, thousands of Ukrainian citizens are being held in Russia, and hundreds of Russian citizens have been jailed for opposing the war. No real and lasting peace can be achieved if these people are left behind, since failure to grant them justice will signal approval of continued Russian repression and imperialist aggression. Oleksandra Matviichuk and Oleg Orlov, joint laureates of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize have co-founded “People First”, an international campaign to focus attention on the needs of thousands of civilians whose lives have been compromised in the conflict. Orlov warns that “If peace is achieved as a result of the collusion of elites, namely Trump and Putin, this will fortify the fascist regime in Russia for many years to come.” The suffering of political prisoners and abducted children is, according to Matviichuk, “beyond Donald Trump’s purview”, meaning that they may be ignored in forthcoming peace negotiations. Ukrainian sources claim that nearly 20,000 children have been forcibly removed to Russia, although an exact number is impossible to determine.

In occupied territories Russian forces have undertaken a process of “filtration” to test inhabitants for loyalty to the regime. If parents fail this test, their children are declared to be “abandoned without parental care” and removed to camps and foster families. Their names and birth records are often changed, making them almost impossible to locate, especially small children who cannot confirm their identity. Ukraine considers this mass deportation an act of genocide and in 2023 the International Criminal Court issued an international arrest warrant against Vladimir Putin and his Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova. There are few reports of children who have successfully been reunited with families in Ukraine, such as Vlad Rudenko, who was rescued after spending 8 months under harrowing conditions in Russian camps that nearly brought him to suicide.

In a recent interview, Orlov described the reign of terror carried out by Russian forces in occupied Ukraine, involving arrests for supposed disloyalty leading to torture by beating and electric shock. Prison wardens are regularly rotated to maximize the misery, since wardens who stay too long at a post can begin to recognize that they are mistreating fellow human beings. The people who might be overlooked in a peace deal are not just abstract statistics. Each one has a personal story. These four individuals (and many more) have been recognized by the international human rights organization Memorial as political prisoners in Russia.

Irina Navalnaya, an IT specialist, is 27 years old, a citizen of Ukraine. When she and her mother evacuated from their home in Mariupol at the beginning of the full-scale war, they were forced to undergo “filtration” by the Russian police who harassed Irina because of her last name (by chance the same as that of Aleksei Navalny) and even put a gun to her head. A few months later she returned to check on her grandmother and collect some of her belongings. She was arrested while riding her bicycle and taken to the police department where she was beaten. After a month of torture at an undisclosed location, to save her life she “confessed” to planning a terrorist attack.

Memorial considers the case against her to be a fabrication. She is now serving an 8-year sentence in a penal colony not far from Rostov-on-Don, Russia. Aleksei Gorinov is 63, a Moscow lawyer who was arrested in April 2022 for suggesting at a council of deputies that it was inappropriate to organize a children’s dance and drawing competition when children are dying in Ukraine. From his cage at the back of the court during his trial he held up a poster saying, “Do you still need this war?”. He received a 7-year sentence.

In November 2024 Aleksei was on trial again, this time for allegedly “advocating terrorism”, and three more years were added to his sentence. During that trial he held up a poster saying, “Enough killing. Let’s stop the war.” Aleksei is currently being held in a penal colony 180 kilometers east of Moscow, where Memorial believes he is being tortured. Sergei Tsygipa is 63, a citizen of Ukraine, and a retired journalist and veteran. Russian occupying forces arrested Sergei in March 2022 on charges of espionage while he was, according to his wife, delivering food and medicine to the elderly in Novaya Kakhovka.

Sergei had organized pro-Ukrainian demonstrations and published social media posts about events in the Kherson region that were picked up by international news networks. He has been deported to a penal colony 300 kilometers south of Moscow where he is serving a 13-year sentence. Sergei was recently awarded in absentia the Igor Lubchenko National Prize for the Protection of Freedom of Speech for 2024 by the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine. Mariia Ponomarenko is 46 years old, has two young children, and until April 2022 she worked as a journalist for the electronic newspaper RusNews in Barnaul, Russia. Her “crime” was a description of the attack of the Russian air force on a theatre in Mariupol, where hundreds of civilians died, an event that was widely reported internationally.

Mariia has been sentenced to 6 years in a penal colony in her hometown of Barnaul in Siberia, where they are currently threatening to add another 2 years to her sentence. She has been subjected to forced psychiatric treatment and denied needed medical help. Irina Navalnaya, Aleksei Gorinov, Sergei Tsypiga, and Mariia Ponomarenko are ordinary Ukrainian and Russian citizens who are being persecuted by the repressive Russian regime. Of course everyone wants the fighting to stop, but there is a real danger that if a peace deal is concluded on Putin’s terms, these people and thousands like them will continue to suffer under inhumane conditions, and Putin will keep pursuing his imperialist trajectory.