Russian prisoners of war (POWs) held in Ukrainian camps are no longer allowed to make phone calls to their relatives, Ukraine’s Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets announced on national television on Sept. 7.
Lubinets said that the ban does not violate the Geneva Conventions, as Russian POWs can still send written letters to their families.
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Earlier in March, the petition calling to ban phone calls for Russian POWs received the needed 25,000 signatures. However, the Ukrainian parliament rejected the proposal back then, saying that phone calls “serve an important informative function, providing objective information to Russians that they should not be afraid to surrender.”
Russian soldiers who have surrendered or have been captured in Ukraine are kept in four POW camps. Conditions there adhere to international laws, particularly the Geneva Conventions, according to Lubinets.
Multiple reports and witnesses show that Ukrainian POWs in Russia are most often kept in horrible conditions, subject to torture, beatings, and starvation.
However, Lubinets latest address comes amid the recent increasing number of Russia’s violating the rights of Ukrainian POWs.
Tit for tat. You mistreat our POW’s we take away a privilege of Russian POWs.
That’s not good war strategy though. The two sides are different, with different resources and tools at their disposal, different goals and thus different strategies.
Tit for tat makes sense on a playground, but not in a theater of war. In war you want to do what gives you the best chance of victory, not what makes your opponent feel bad. Not that Putin even cares about his POWs much.
I mean I think the reason they kept it up so long was to disemeinate the info but given they have a few years now of data going over it does not really do them much at this point.
It’s game theory 101. And it is maybe designed to ramp up domestic pressure.