“Together, Let’s Save Ukrainian Hostages”

In January 2026, Desk Russie and the association “For Ukraine, for their freedom and ours!” (PLU) organized, at Paris City Hall, an evening debate dedicated to the plight of the Ukrainian people in the occupied territories, and in particular to the fate of thousands of Ukrainians arbitrarily arrested by the occupying forces, imprisoned, tortured, often without any communication with the outside world. Several associations are now organizing to fight for these Ukrainians. The goal is to have French municipalities sponsor the prisoners so that each one is monitored and their families supported. We are publishing the speech by Pierre Raiman, vice-president of PLU, delivered at the opening of a Zoom meeting held on May 5 between members of the involved organizations, some mayors, and French citizens of goodwill to launch the sponsorship campaign. Desk Russie will systematically cover the progress of this campaign.

One Hundred Cities for Sixteen Thousand Hostages: The First Links in a European Civic Shield

2,500 or 3,000 kilometers from Paris, in occupied Donbas, or isolated within the Russian Empire, in Olevnika or Taganrog, 16,000 Ukrainian civilians are being arbitrarily detained in the Kremlin’s prisons. A citizen-led campaign is launching to break their silence—through municipal sponsorship, spearheaded by the association For Ukraine, for Their Freedom and Ours! (PLU), the Union of Ukrainians in France, and the Ukrainian movements “RETURN FREEDOM” and Civilni Vilni.

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Sixteen thousand people.

Sixteen thousand Ukrainian civilians—women, men, journalists, teachers, priests, mayors, ordinary citizens—arbitrarily detained by Russia. Sixteen thousand lives torn from their loved ones, locked away somewhere, two thousand kilometers from here, in silence.

It is time to begin breaking this silence.

Who they are

They are not combatants. They are civilians. They have committed no crime. They were arrested for who they are, not for what they did.

Journalists, because they were reporting the news. Teachers, because they refused the Russian curricula imposed on their students. Mayors, because they had been democratically elected. Priests, because they rejected the corrupt Church of Moscow. Parents, because they refused to let their children be Russified. Athletes, who were role models, and civilian volunteers.

Ordinary people, attached to their language, their flag, their country.

Why the word “hostage”?

Why are we talking about hostages? Because the word has a precise legal meaning. The 1979 International Convention, the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Rome Statute: a hostage is a person captured to exert pressure on a third party—a government, a population, an international organization.

Russia is not holding these civilians for what they have done. It is holding them as bargaining chips and as instruments of terror, as leverage for future negotiations, to secure territorial, military, and diplomatic concessions in the future. This is a hostage-taking in the strict sense of international law, that is to say, a war crime.

This crime has a history. Every time Ukraine has attempted to emerge as a free and European nation—the People’s Republic of 1917 and the brief cultural renaissance of the 1920s cut short by the Holodomor and Stalinist terror, the dissidents thrown into the Gulag in the 1960s, and, more recently, the Maidan Ukraine under attack since 2014—the Russian Empire has offered the same response: to erase a people by first erasing those who embody it. Its teachers, its journalists, its priests, its mayors, its local elected officials. The forced disappearances we denounce today in the occupied territories are not collateral damage of war. They are the very purpose of the war.

What We Are Launching

Tonight, therefore, together with our partners—the Union of Ukrainians in France, and our Ukrainian friends at Return Freedom and Civilni Vilni / Free Civilians—we are launching the campaign “Together, Let’s Save Ukrainian Hostages.” It is open to all organizations committed to defending Ukrainian prisoners.

Four objectives. Simple. Clear.

Break the silence in the occupied territories—Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Crimea. Kherson, battered but resilient. Europe must know what is happening there: forced disappearances, Russification, daily terror.

Bring the hostages out of anonymity. Give them a name, a face, a story. No hostage forgotten.

Demand access for the ICRC, the UN, and the OSCE to detention sites, and medical care for the prisoners, many of whom are seriously ill or injured.

Secure their release. Make the release of civilian hostages and the return of deported children a precondition for any negotiations with Moscow. No peace agreement without them.

Four areas of action

How can this be achieved? Four complementary areas.

First, public events and films. Two documentaries with French subtitles are available to anyone wishing to screen them—Izolyatsiya, by Igor Minaev, on the illegal detention center in Donetsk, and Prisoners: The System of Terror, by Evgenia Chirikova, on the detention of Ukrainian civilians. Their directors are available to take part in discussions, either in person or via videoconference.

Next—and this is the operational core of our initiative—is the sponsorship of hostages by municipalities. A French, Belgian, or Swiss municipality commits to sponsoring a specific Ukrainian civilian prisoner, with the written consent of their family. It officially demands their release and gives them lasting public visibility. Our goal: one hundred cities, two hundred sponsored hostages by the end of 2026. Every city council that adopts a sponsorship resolution makes a face and a name visible—and places its city alongside a hostage.

Then an open letter to the President of the French Republic, urging him to bring this cause to the highest European and international levels.

Finally, a public commitment from the French, Belgian, Swiss, and European Union governments: that no ceasefire is meaningful without the release of civilian hostages and the return of deported children.

What we are asking of you

There are many of you here tonight. You are elected officials, activists, journalists, citizens, Ukrainians in France, and friends of Ukraine. This campaign cannot succeed without you.

If you are an elected official: bring the sponsorship initiative before your city council. If you know an elected official: speak to them tomorrow. If you are a journalist: write about these hostages. If you are an ordinary citizen: organize a screening or a meeting in your city; contact your elected officials. And everyone: mobilize your network.

One hundred cities. Two hundred sponsored hostages. A name, a face, a voice for each one.

This is what, together with Sylvie Rollet, we call “the beginning of a European civic shield.”

An announcement

One last thing. And it’s an announcement.

The first official request to establish contact regarding a sponsorship has just been sent to the City of Paris.

Paris, the first city approached. Paris, which could, in the coming weeks, become the first major European capital to sponsor two Ukrainian civilian hostages: Anastasia Hloukhovska, a journalist imprisoned for three years, and Oleg Chevandine, who has been missing in Putin’s prisons since 2015—and pave the way for a hundred other cities, in France and across Europe.

So tonight, we ask for three things, three words.

Know. Speak. Act.

Know these hostages. Tell people who they are, everywhere around you. Act, in your city, starting this week. Get in touch with the campaign by writing to [email protected].

Glory to Ukraine.