October 17, 2024: Ukraine and Russia are planning more prisoner of war (POW) exchanges. In January 2024 Ukraine held thousands of Russian POWs and some interned Russian civilians. Russia held thousands of Ukrainian POWs but had also kidnapped millions of Ukrainian adults and children to Russia. The children were taken first, and some of those under five years old were adopted by Russian families. Ukrainian teenagers often escaped or tried to escape and get back to Ukraine. The Ukrainian government has complained to the International Criminal Court (ICC) about these mass Russian kidnappings of children and adults. In March 2023 the ICC issued arrest warrants for Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, and the Russian commissioner for children's rights. The ICC is also looking into the Russian practices of declaring soldiers criminals and subject to imprisonment if they return to Russia.

So far, there have been 49 exchanges of prisoners. Ukraine has captured more Russian soldiers plus many who surrendered and are less eager to return to the Russian army. Meanwhile NATO and Ukraine are planning for post-war reconstruction and refugee support, which will include the reintegration of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and returning refugees. Ukraine demands that Ukrainian civilians compelled to move to Russia, sometimes by soldiers with orders to shoot those who resist, be allowed to return home.

The Ukraine War has caused a regional refugee crisis. Nearly half the population of Ukraine has been displaced for one reason or another. While 7.5 million Ukrainians have registered as refugees outside Ukraine, even more have not been registered because they were forcibly moved to Russia or because they failed to register for a number of reasons. Most of the refugees are inside Ukraine. These are described as IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons), who increased early in the war as the Russians captured more Ukrainian territory and Ukrainian civilians who refused to flee.

The Russians are losing on the battlefield. The cheap cruise missiles they bought from Iran proved to be ineffective against the Ukrainian military, so the Russians began using these missiles to attack residential areas of cities. The intent was to make more Ukrainians homeless and force them to leave the country or scrounge for whatever shelter they could find in Ukraine. The small warhead of these Iranian cruise missiles does little damage but it's enough to encourage more Ukrainians to leave the country or become IDPs. It did not, as the Russians expected, demoralize Ukrainians. Instead Ukrainian civilians became more resolute about defeating the Russian military. The Russians discovered this when they found that administering occupied Ukrainian territory was dangerous for the administrators. Some of the Ukrainians engaged in sabotage and assassination of Russian occupation officials. This forced Russia to assign troops to provide security for Russian officials operating in occupied Ukraine, but this was not effective. The soldiers were facing Ukrainian guerillas operating among a friendly population. Russian military commanders were angry about troops being assigned to security duties in occupied Ukrainian territory. By 2024 the Russians were running out of soldiers willing or able to fight the Ukrainians. At the same time these troops considered security work in captured Ukrainian towns and cities safer, although still dangerous.

From the beginning of the war nations bordering Russia or Ukraine made an extraordinary, in terms of financial cost, effort to assist Ukraine during the first six weeks of the war. For example, tiny Estonia, with a population 1.3 million, spent about .8 percent of its annual GDP to support Ukraine during those six weeks. Most of the aid went to processing and hosting Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian attacks on their homes. By late 2022 the Ukrainians and their NATO supporters were planning for what to do after the war. By 2024 Russian troops were literally on the run and Russia has few options left.

For Ukraine, the post-war years will be expensive because of the need to support all the IDPs as well as returning refugees. NATO is already budgeting money for this while both NATO and Ukraine ponder what to do about the thousands of Russian POWs Ukraine has and the millions of Ukrainians kidnapped to Russia since 2022. Russia won’t let any of them return to Ukraine.

Nations receiving Ukraine refugees are also seeing a lot of Russians fleeing Russia. This was noted after the war began when Turkey estimated that 50,000 Ukrainian refugees had already entered Turkey a month after the 2022 Russian invasion. The Turks expected that those numbers would increase dramatically as long as the war lasted. Turkey already hosts around 3.7 million refugees from the Syrian civil war. Anti-war Russians have also fled to Turkey, with at least 14,000 Russians entering Turkey during the first month of the war.

Russia has threatened NATO members Poland, Romania and Slovakia because they border Ukraine and served as the initial hosts for millions of Ukrainian refugees from the fighting. Not to mention more than a million Russians who fled Russia because of its economic problems and later because of efforts to conscript them to die in Ukraine.

By the end of 2022 an estimated three million Ukrainians were kidnapped to Russia, though some did go voluntarily. Driving all Russian troops out of Ukraine won’t automatically get all the Ukrainians in Russia back. It is believed that as much as half the Ukrainians leaving for Russia in 2024 were compelled to do so by the Russians as part of the filtration process to pacify civilians in Russian occupied Ukraine. These tactics are considered a war crime and unless there is a change of government in Russia, getting those filtration Ukrainians held in Russia back will be difficult.

Winter is coming in Ukraine and IDPs are often the least able to deal with the lack of heat. Ukrainians in general are facing months of cold weather with no way of heating their homes. Russian attacks have concentrated on destroying Ukrainian energy sources and supplies. Ukraine needs a lot of help from NATO to deal with that.