There is a room in western Ukraine where men from Somalia, Cameroon, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Egypt and Brazil are waiting for an exchange that is not coming.
Shaun Pinner has now been in that room twice in twelve months. When he first visited in June 2025, he estimates the camp was around eighty percent ethnic Russian. Going back last week, he put it closer to sixty-forty. The men recognised him. They had spoken to him for two hours, thirteen months earlier, and they remembered, and the first thing they asked was whether he had any news. He had to backfill a year of war for them while trying not to make their situation worse than it already was.
He travelled with Ken Harbaugh, a former U.S. Navy pilot looking at the medical side — conditions, treatment, what the Red Cross has installed. Pinner’s assessment of the facilities is worth sitting with: new scanners, new X-ray equipment, better in places than regional Ukrainian hospitals serving civilians. Audited by humanitarian organisations that Russia does not permit onto its own territory. He is not naive about the optics of a show prison. He was in Russian captivity himself for five months. He says he never saw one.
The reason those men are still there is arithmetic, and the arithmetic is Moscow’s.
Simon Ostrovsky, who has reported from the same camp for the NewsHour, laid it out plainly. A foreign recruit costs Russia almost nothing when he dies — none of the substantial death payments owed to Russian families, sums running into the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, which are frequently withheld from Russian families anyway. And if he is captured rather than killed, Russia simply declines to trade for him. Under the Geneva Conventions, Ukraine is then obliged to hold him until the war ends. Whenever that is.
So the men wait. And, according to Pinner, many of them wait believing they have a claim.
“We are Russian,” he was told. “We have passports. We should be considered for exchange.”
What he could not say to them, because he is bound by the same conventions not to demoralise prisoners, he said on our program instead: you are not ethnic Russian, you are not an officer, you are not connected. Those are the routes out. You have none of them. And they cannot simply go home, because in many of their countries fighting in a foreign army is itself a crime.
Pinner cited a figure now circulating in Ukrainian military circles — attributed to Andriy Biletsky — that one in three prisoners taken is not Russian-born. He went back specifically to test it against what he could see. He is careful to say he cannot prove it. He is equally clear that what he observed points hard in that direction, and that the shift has accelerated sharply in a matter of months.
The pipeline that feeds this has a shape, and Pinner has been tracing it with African journalists who are, in his account, chasing the story considerably harder than Western newsrooms are. Move a man from Mogadishu to a country with a Russian consulate. Fast-track him to Moscow. Put a Russian-language contract in front of him. A Moroccan friend of his, Brahim — exchanged alongside Pinner and Aiden Aslin in the last swap that included foreigners — phoned the mother of an Egyptian prisoner to tell her where her son was. Eight months, and no Russian authority had told her anything. They did not interview her. They just told her.
Ostrovsky is blunt about why the recruitment works: if your life is already terrible, it does not take much propaganda at all. Russian citizenship, healthcare, a salary — measured against destitution, it looks like a ladder. What is not disclosed is the survival curve. On the battlefield many of these men are not trained so much as pushed, sent toward Ukrainian positions in the expectation that returning fire will reveal those positions to Russian gunners. Ostrovsky’s framing of it is the one I keep returning to: you walk into the open on a mission you know is suicidal, because you have calculated that what is behind you is worse.
Meanwhile Ostrovsky has just come back from Tbilisi, at the other end of the same problem. Russia can stop the war without its declared goals, or it can find more bodies. The signing bonuses — a year’s salary, in some cases — are no longer pulling the numbers they once did, because the word is out that you do not last long enough to spend it. So the police lean on men over invented offences: sign this, or look at seven years. The Russians he met in Georgia have left rather than gamble on it, working remotely from cafés — accountants and designers turned, in his phrase, forced digital nomads.
The second half of the conversation was about the cost of knowing any of this firsthand.
Ostrovsky spent three days in a cellar in Sloviansk in 2014, blindfolded with a winter hat pulled over his eyes and tape wound around it. He learned who had interrogated him only years later, when Igor Girkin told a British newspaper he had done it. Girkin is now in a Russian prison for extremism — too extreme, in the Kremlin’s estimation, for a Kremlin war — and was sentenced to life in absentia in the Netherlands over MH17. Ostrovsky’s own footage from the crash site, showing proxy fighters and emergency services carting material away from what was a crime scene, went into that investigation.
Pinner was captured on 13 April 2022 and exchanged on 22 September, in the swap that returned Viktor Medvedchuk and fifty-five Russians for a hundred and fifty Ukrainians and ten foreigners. In between: electrocuted at the ears with a field telephone, stabbed in the leg at capture, starved, sixty days underground in Donetsk while a proxy court handed down a death sentence. He is precise about the division of labour — the men who took him looked like a militia, mismatched camouflage, gear he compared to a toy shop. The men who did the serious work were pristine, patches removed, unmistakably Russian.
What both of them describe as the worst of it is not the violence. It is the information vacuum. Not knowing whether anyone knows. Not knowing whether anyone cares if they do know.
And they both went back to work.
That is the part I want subscribers to hold onto, because it connects directly to the thing we spent the middle of the show arguing about: the economics. It costs nothing to sit in a living room and relitigate someone else’s reporting, and the market rewards it handsomely. It costs a great deal to put a reporter on a plane, keep him on one story for weeks, and print it once. Ostrovsky’s Substack and YouTube revenue does not go into his pocket; it goes into travel, local producers, camera operators. He is finishing a documentary called See You in Heaven, about Ukraine’s evangelical communities — built on the sound insight that you do not win an American audience by telling them Ukraine is strategically important. You show them a church that prays the way theirs does. An excerpt screens at the Ukraine Action Summit in Washington on 16 October, and he is raising finishing funds.
He is back in Ukraine in early October. Pinner is in Sumy next week with war crimes investigators. I am here, where I have been since January 2022.
The war has meanwhile produced a new civilian object: the drone detector. A handheld screen that scans for video signal and shows you what the drone above you is seeing — which means it can show you that the drone is looking at you. Journalists carry them. So do grandmothers in Kherson and Sumy, where Russian operators hunt people at vegetable stands and on bicycles and post the video afterwards. The safety course now teaches you that if the detector lights up while you are in a vehicle, you stop, everyone runs in a different direction, and you hope the drone takes the car, or takes only one of you.
Ostrovsky, asked what still surprises him, went back to Crimea in 2014 — the certainty, right up until it happened, that no one annexes European territory by force in the twenty-first century. He also offered the observation I would put on a wall: Putin is credited as a grandmaster, but by manufacturing his proxy states in 2014 he gave Ukraine both the reason and the eight years to build the army now grinding him down.
There is no invoice for this conversation. There never is. The invoice goes to you.
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