Ukraine: From Human Rights Defender to POW: Maksym Butkevych's 2-Year Journey Through Russian Captivity

In this powerful interview, renowned Ukrainian human rights defender Maksym Butkevych opens up about his transition from civilian activist to military service, his 2.5-year imprisonment in Russian-occupied territory, and his recent liberation through a prisoner exchange. Butkevych reveals that the greatest danger in Russian captivity wasn’t physical hardship but “losing a part of oneself.” Despite facing a 13-year sentence based on fabricated charges, he found meaning in his imprisonment by viewing it as “field research” into human rights violations, strengthening his faith, and deepening his understanding of human nature. The former UN refugee coordinator explains how his decision to join Ukraine’s armed forces stemmed from the conviction that “if the Russians won, there would be no more human rights protection in this territory,” and shares his plans to continue human rights work with a renewed focus on freeing other prisoners of war.

The entire ZMINA human rights center team had been waiting for this conversation after receiving the good news of the liberation of human rights activist, organization co-founder, journalist, and prisoner of war Maksym Butkevych. This release took place on October 18 this year, during the 58th prisoner of war exchange. The human rights activist had spent over two years in detention.

ZMINA met with Maksym at a train station, during a stop between two locations on his rehabilitation journey, to discuss his participation in the war on the ground, his more than two years of captivity, the meaning he found in it, as well as the rehabilitation process for soldiers after their return from captivity and the challenges of returning to civilian life.

“I Understood That if the Russians Won, There Would Be No More Human Rights Protection in This Territory”

Maksym, you’ve been involved in human rights work for over 20 years, and at the start of the full-scale invasion, you decided to join the Ukrainian armed forces. What guided your choice to change activities and join the army?

"This is a very important question. I just discovered that many things were said and written about me in the media during my absence. And some of these texts said I was a pacifist. But I’m not a pacifist. However, I’m indeed not an advocate of violence as a method, and military engagement, in one way or another, involves killing people. This is a moral and ethical problem and dilemma for me.

The situation we found ourselves in on February 24, 2022, placed us before a choice: either let our freedom be destroyed or fight. Otherwise, we would have been forced to give up our activity, forced to obey, to simply eat, drink, sleep, be afraid, and do what we were told. That would have been our perspective. So we had to resist to save our freedom. For me, this is something essentially human. This is really what makes a person human: freedom, awareness of their freedom, and the meaning that this freedom brings.

I perfectly understood that if the Russians won, there would be no more human rights protection in this territory. It would be impossible. We fought for a very long time for the rights we have today. We succeeded in some things, we failed in others, but if they occupied these territories, everything would be destroyed. In the end, if I think selfishly, these are many years of my life, in fact, the main thing I’ve done in recent years, all the achievements, all the successes, would have been destroyed."

How did you end up in the army, specifically in Special Battalion number 210 Berlingo?

"I had completed military training at university during my studies and was an officer. In the army, they call this kind of person a ’jacket’ - people who have an officer’s rank but no army experience and even less combat experience.

I reported to the military registration and enlistment office on the evening of February 24 to find a territorial defense unit and join it. They asked for my military rank, and I said I had the rank of lieutenant from university military training but that I didn’t remember anything anymore. But I was ready to take a shovel and dig whatever was needed.

At that time, fighting was beginning near Kyiv and Russians were already visible on the outskirts. I had prepared a backpack in advance, bought some things and a travel Bible, and was ready to join. By the way, during my time in the colony, my faith was one of the pillars that helped me hold on. I hadn’t talked about it before, it was primarily a private matter. I don’t accept imposing anything, including in the religious domain. At the same time, we shouldn’t confuse imposing with preaching. Many people, including my friends, didn’t know about my religious convictions. Today, I think about it more often, because something has changed - in me and in the world."

“We Didn’t Expect to Be Taken Prisoner; We Thought We’d Be ’200s’ (Killed) or ’300s’ (Wounded)”

Do you feel that higher powers helped you get through your captivity episode, or was it your inner strength?

"Yes, I have that feeling. But in my view, faith and inner strength are connected. I have the feeling there’s meaning, inseparable from the meaning of life. To put it another way, it’s the feeling that things aren’t ’just like that.’

During one of the interrogations, they tried to get the passwords for my Facebook account and email. At that time, I didn’t yet know that my Facebook account had fortunately been deactivated by friends, but anyway, I had two-factor authentication... I told them that they couldn’t get into my account anyway since they had lost my phone themselves. I added that the password had probably been changed and that if I gave them an old password now, they would say I was deceiving them. They asked who had changed them, and I answered: ’friends to whom I left my passwords.’

Indeed, I had left them in case I ended up a ’200’ so these friends could go on my page and announce it and could get into my email account and write an automatic response like ’unfortunately the person cannot read your message because they are dead.’ It’s always sad when people comment on posts of someone who has disappeared... The investigator looked at me with wide eyes and asked if I had really thought in advance that I could become a ’200.’ I told him that this was war, that we had gone to fight it, and that there were indeed situations where I could become a ’200’ and that of course I had thought about it like anyone who finds themselves on the front line."

So you admitted the possibility of dying in war?

"I think everyone who goes to the front line thinks internally - consciously or unconsciously - about what will happen when I’m ’300’ or ’200.’ However, I saw practically no one think about what would happen if they were captured. We weren’t prepared for that. Therefore, when we were captured, we were surprised.

We create ourselves by making different choices in life. The choices we make now determine who we will be later. Later, many times in prison, both in the detention center and then in the penal colony, the guys and I discussed what had happened and why it had happened. I had 20 men. Under my orders, I was platoon commander in the 210th special battalion ’Berlingo’ of the Ukrainian army’s ground forces. But in captivity, my fellow detainees regularly told me: we don’t know what kind of commander you were - I don’t know myself, to be honest, only my men could tell me - but you would have been better off working in media, or helping people, since these are indeed things I know how to do, and it would have been more useful for all of us than my stay in the Luhansk detention center (SIZO). Indeed, anything is more useful than being locked up in the Luhansk SIZO.

But I must say that I don’t consider this time as lost. Sometimes, the guys were so depressed they thought their time in captivity had been lost, simply erased from their life. But I didn’t have that feeling. And when I examined what I had done wrong since the start of the invasion, the bad choices I had made, I came to the conclusion that there were no bad choices. There are things I regret in my life, but not in this chain of actions. I did everything that needed to be done."

How did you become aware that the time spent in captivity hadn’t been lost?

"It’s certainly a period of losses. It’s a period of lack, of deprivation of something very human and very personal. The greatest danger of captivity is losing a part of oneself. As far as I’m concerned, I tried to understand what I could learn from this experience, what could help me later, if something could help me better help others.

In captivity, I learned to better understand people, the world, and of course, human rights violations. In short, I can say that I did two and a half years of field research. I had never specialized in the prison system and the human rights violations committed there, but in captivity, I learned to know it very well and to understand fundamental things more deeply and broadly.

I also had the opportunity to organize my thoughts and beliefs, to understand how they are connected to each other, to what extent my positions are well-founded, my attitude toward certain things, whether I have sufficient reasons to think what I think and say what I say. And above all, what the priorities should be in my activities, in my life."

“In Captivity, I Constantly Thought About What I Didn’t Have Time to Think About in Civilian Life”

As a human rights defender, you were shaped by fundamental values related to human rights. Did they change in any way in prison?

"I think my values only grew stronger. In our daily lives, we are constantly immersed in a flow of events, information, activities, and sometimes we simply don’t have time to examine certain things from a different perspective - broader or higher.

In captivity, very quickly, literally from the first days, I thought that I now had a chance to do that. I tried to do internally things that I hadn’t had time to do for years. In captivity, I constantly thought about those I hadn’t had time to think about properly in civilian life. And that’s not all. I also prayed. In fact, it was probably the only thing I could do for many wonderful people.

After a year and a half in captivity, when I had the possibility to read, I started reading many books, as I did before. In addition to books in Russian and Ukrainian, I got my hands on some books in English that someone else owned, and thanks to them and compiling texts in my head, I tried to preserve the language as much as possible. All the books I read were noted in my notebook."

What exactly did you read? Which books do you remember most?

"In the penal colony, there was a library, and you could find the most unexpected things there. I was delighted by the book ’Theoretical and Applied Linguistics’ by Professor Zvegintsev, published in 1968, which I read one and a half times. I discovered many different books - on zoopsychology, philosophy, theology, and fiction. For example, I read Chekhov, which I hadn’t had time to read for a long time. I reread many things I had read before, but I read them in a new way. You could also find books in Ukrainian in this library, whether Ukrainian works or translations of great foreign authors, until they were finally removed in spring and early summer of this year.

Back at the detention center, the first book worthy of the name was the New Testament and Psalms, which, by a strange coincidence, arrived in our cell and which I had to read 15 times. By the way, we sometimes read aloud, because not all cell members could read. One comrade, a prisoner of war, was wounded and had almost lost his sight, and another prisoner couldn’t do it because of his age. In general, during my detention, I read dozens of books, 50, I believe, at least. In the colony, when I was working, the privileged moment for me was 40 minutes before curfew. I would lie on my ’palm tree’ - a bed on the second level of bunks - and read for the 40 minutes before lights out.

We also practiced English at the SIZO and in the colony. I taught it for the first time in my life. One of my ’students’ made quite good progress. He insisted that I patent this methodology, because we were learning the language without text, without pen, without paper, memorizing words according to a certain system and using the tools at our disposal.

For example, we had a cigarette filter, a burnt match, a piece of cigarette packet, and that’s how I explained the structure of a sentence - where the auxiliary verb is, etc. We learned English through song lyrics. I suddenly discovered that I remembered quite unexpected lyrics, although very few. It turned out that the lyrics of a famous English song I remembered were perfect for learning the present continuous."

Let’s return to your military engagement. What task or battle do you remember most?

"There were two stages in my engagement: the first time was toward Irpin-Vorzel, in the Zhytomyr region, near the Zhytomyr highway, and the second in eastern Ukraine. My unit was tasked with reinforcing the National Guard in a certain area of the Kyiv region. We went to the checkpoint with our vehicles and found that it wasn’t a checkpoint, but the front line: the Russians were standing a few hundred meters away. That’s how we found ourselves on the front line in the Kyiv region.

At the end of the street where we were stationed, there was a pharmacy, a post office, and several houses destroyed by Russian tank fire. There was the body of a civilian who had fled the bombardment and hadn’t managed to survive; his leg was standing up by itself. A few minutes after our arrival, before we even had time to get our grenade launchers, an armored personnel carrier came racing from the Russian side and, positioning itself in front of us, began firing at us with a large-caliber machine gun across the street. I remember this episode very well, the first direct contact. I also remember our entry into Mykhailivka-Rubezhivka during the liberation of these villages. The inhabitants welcomed us with tears in their eyes, brought us flowers, boxes of tomato juice - everything they had after a month of occupation. In short, it was absolutely incredible. You could feel that people were waiting for us.

The second experience is linked to a journey to the East. We received orders to move to reinforce our units holding the defense in the Donbass. It was a completely different experience because we were in the steppe, where some of our weapons were simply ineffective. For example, what constituted our advantage in urban combat was completely nullified there. We fulfilled the function of conventional ground troops, accomplishing the tasks assigned to us."

“First we lost radio contact, then in the morning we understood that we were practically surrounded”

Can you tell us when and under what circumstances you were captured?

"We had received orders to go to the village of Myrna Dolyna, in the Luhansk region. Near the village, there are forests and quite difficult terrain, that is, not steppe, but ravines. Upon our arrival in the evening, we immediately came under heavy mortar fire. The fire lasted all night.

In the morning, the village was completely different from the previous evening. Not much was left of it. During a pause, we received orders to move and take observation posts along the road that went from Lysychansk in the north to Zolote in the south. It was a strategically important road for us. Our task was to observe and, if there were enemy forces, to report them. However, we were not to engage in combat without orders. While the order was being transmitted to us, another mortar attack began, and that’s how we made our way to our observation post.

At one point, we had communication problems. The radios we had weren’t good enough, there weren’t enough of them, and obviously, the enemy’s electronic equipment was working. Moreover, we quickly ran out of water on the way to the post; it was a very hot June. In a few hours, we lost all communication. Even the walkie-talkies they had given us weren’t picking up anyone. By morning, we had noticed that a large number of enemy people and vehicles had entered the neighboring terrain.

As we were already heading toward Myrna Dolyna, it was clear that we were almost surrounded by the enemy. You see, it’s like a kind of bottle where you enter through the neck, and there was already enemy-controlled territory around this bottle. We understood that this didn’t bode well, but we had orders and we had to execute them. Later, arriving at the post, when we saw the ’O’ marks on the vehicles, we understood that it was the enemy. But at that point, we could no longer execute the order to report enemy forces, there was no communication, there was also no order to engage in combat and it made no sense, given the difference in numbers between us and our enemies, and it was clear that we had to withdraw.

That’s when one of the soldiers from the neighboring unit made contact with us and brought us to the observation post. He told us that the entire area was surrounded, but that the ring wasn’t yet closed. Therefore, we had to try to leave using his landmarks. That’s what we did. To be honest, we had the feeling that something wasn’t right, but we didn’t have time to think about it and we had no other options. We had practically not slept for several days, we had been without water for almost 24 hours, we were tired, and some of my men weren’t doing well. Then this soldier fired a flare, which was very strange in these near-encirclement conditions. We had to run through the field up to our waists to the forest belt where the flare came from. When we were a few dozen meters away, he told us he was sorry, but he had been a prisoner since the night before, that we were now in their sights and that if we didn’t lay down our arms, they would kill us."

What did you feel at that moment?

"There was an open field around us. There was no possibility of throwing ourselves to the ground, hiding, or running away. We were no longer accomplishing any combat mission - we weren’t covering anyone anymore, we weren’t defending anything anymore. I had eight men and I was responsible for them. So I gave the order to lay down our arms.

The guy who brought us out was in the same cell as us. He was forced to do it under physical pressure and violence. But mainly, he believed that by forcing us to surrender, he had saved our lives - that’s what the Russians told him. Maybe it was true, it’s difficult for me to judge.

How did the Russians treat you?

"They immediately took our documents, our phones, and some valuables. For example, they took my wireless earphones, someone’s watch, an object from another... One of the Russian soldiers asked who the earphones belonged to. I answered they were mine. He asked if I would give them to him. It’s true that when you’re on your knees, with your hands tied and a machine gun pointed at you, you’re ready to give anything, in principle. But I said no. He was very surprised, even a bit troubled. I told him it was a gift from someone close, and that ’you don’t give away gifts.’ He agreed, but he didn’t understand what he should do.

Obviously, they were trying to avoid understanding that they were stealing things from prisoners. I told him he should probably call it a ’trophy’ or something prettier than what it really was. Later, at another moment, another soldier took what was left, for example a new Chinese tactical watch, although cheap. He didn’t bother naming anything, he simply took everything. Another soldier who still had his bulletproof vest was taken away, being asked not to tell his commanders about it. As we understood, they had worse ones at the time. They also took our expensive shoes - we spent the following months in socks.

Did the Russians know who you were and what you did in civilian life? Did your activities in human rights and journalism have an impact on your time in captivity?

“After a few days in the detention center, I started receiving special attention. But then, for the rest of the captivity, the attitude was quite normal. On the way to the transfer point, the Russians asked which of us was an officer, and I answered. They wanted to make a video of me scolding the command. I refused to do it. I told them they could of course force me to do it, but it would be visible and clear that it had been done under physical constraint.”

“They Made Us Kneel, Hands Tied, and Verbally Abused and Intimidated Us”

Where were you first taken when you were captured?

"At the end of the day, we were taken to a dilapidated building where we spent the night on the concrete floor. At one point, a masked officer appeared, a senior officer, and everyone obeyed him. He made us kneel, hands tied, and spoke to us, provoking strong emotional reactions from the guys, verbally abusing us to demonstrate his supposed ’superiority.’

He would ask, for example, who had wives abroad, in Poland, Germany, or Turkey. He would then start telling the guys his pathological sexual fantasies about what men must be doing to them there, right now, with details. He would paint them pictures of forced collective, oral, and anal sexual acts. It was clear this man had sexual pathology problems. He threatened to sentence us to 10-15 years and send us to a penal colony for ’sexual pleasures,’ and to make us arrive in Kyiv without our front teeth. Explaining why we wouldn’t have front teeth anymore.

Then they brought us military rations and only untied our hands when we went one by one, under gun threat, to defecate in a transparent plastic barrel, cut at the top, which was in a corner.

I must say that afterwards, we were treated more calmly, without humiliation. To be honest, I tried not to push too hard. I immediately chose the following line of conduct: I have nothing to hide, but I shouldn’t pretend to be someone else either. I tried to take on the risky and provocative conversations so that the guys wouldn’t get drawn into them."

Did you or your men suffer violence from the Russian army?

"Later, when new soldiers in uniform arrived, they took us one by one into neighboring rooms, asked us questions about our service, and recorded videos of us. It was a bit like an interrogation. Thus, when one of the soldiers was brought in for interrogation, he said he couldn’t remember his commanders’ call signs. So he was hit several times with a wooden hook. I immediately told the guys that since we didn’t have any confidential information, we had to tell everything during the interrogation to save our skin.

They intimidated me afterwards by showing me a pit in the backyard, threatening to throw me in it and show me those who “didn’t understand how to behave.”

There was an interesting moment when they recorded a video with me. One of them said to the other: “Look, he really is a journalist, because he said what he wanted, not what we needed.” Later, the masked officer mentioned earlier read us excerpts from Putin’s message of February 22, 2022, I believe, where he talks about Ukraine, and those who were pointed out by the officer had to recite these excerpts word for word, and if someone made a mistake or stuttered, I was beaten with a stick. Because I was the only officer, the commander, and this “connoisseur of Putin’s history” had it in for me. I thought it was better they beat me than my men.

Then, they took us elsewhere and threw us onto a concrete floor. There, they removed our eye bandages, untied our hands, and we saw that we were in a cell. They then brought old torn mattresses and towels. Some of them bore the stamp of the Luhansk SIZO. That’s how we knew where we were. In total, I spent a year and three months in the detention center, until September 2023.

On March 6, 2023, the occupation court of the Luhansk region sentenced you to 13 years in prison and accused you of “cruel treatment of civilians and use of prohibited methods in an armed conflict.” How did this article come about?

"In the Luhansk SIZO, we were actively interrogated by various structures: people in military uniform and civilian clothes. They asked us questions about our unit’s movements, where we were, and our numbers. On July 16, I was interrogated by two people, one in civilian clothes and the other in some kind of non-regulation camouflage. One of the investigators was interested in the Soros Foundation’s activities in Ukraine and wanted me to give an interview to an unnamed ’reputable international media’ to talk about it. I told him I didn’t want to give an interview, but that if they forced me to do it, I could tell him what I knew: that the Ukrainian branch of the foundation supported projects on decentralization, local government, legal aid, and academic publications.

He didn’t much appreciate the conversation and that’s when I heard for the first time: ’We’re going to put you in prison.’ This promise materialized a month later, on August 13."

He didn’t much appreciate the conversation and that’s when I heard for the first time: “We’re going to put you in prison.” This promise materialized a month later, on August 13. I was taken for an interrogation, where people in uniform, faces covered, sat me in such a way that I could only see the floor, it was uncomfortable, they unbalanced me in various ways, they intimidated me. Then they told me there were three options: the first was to sign everything they gave me without reading it, it would be a confession to war crimes, I would be sentenced and then exchanged; the second was to refuse to sign the documents, and I would then be taken for an “experimental investigation” meaning I would be killed supposedly trying to escape; the third option was to stay in prison without any exchange for who knows how long, or rather, as long as they wanted. Thus, if I didn’t cooperate and didn’t sign anything, I wouldn’t get out unharmed, neither physically nor psychologically. They told me that at 45, one could end one’s life. If I agreed, they would take me to the backyard, give me a cigarette, let me call home, then they would shoot me.

One of the interrogators asked if I wanted to live and I answered that yes, if God allowed it. He latched onto this response and, when he learned I was Christian, he said: “Well, we’re not Christians, this doesn’t concern us.” They then printed the interrogation report, making a mistake about where I had “committed the crime.”

Later, I learned that it was about me allegedly firing a grenade launcher at a residential building where there were people, and that two women had been injured. Anyway, according to them, it didn’t matter what was written on the papers, they could convict me without my testimony. They told me that if I signed the documents quickly, they would be sent to the prosecutor then to the court, and I could go home in October - I would be exchanged.

Later, when they were finalizing my case, they took me to Sievierodonetsk, to the house I had allegedly fired at. They asked me to raise my hand, to point to a specific window, took photos of me, told me to show the pit and to remember the address. When I asked what this was about, they answered that I would know later. The only thing I insisted on at that moment, to the extent that it was possible to insist in this situation, was that I wouldn’t testify against anyone, only against myself, and that the case had to proceed without any deaths.

“There was no doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t serve the entire sentence”

How did you react to the 13-year prison sentence?

"I was expecting it. The guys in the cell and I were thinking about how long my sentence would be. They were more optimistic. I was expecting 12-15 years, so that’s what they gave me. But I hoped there would soon be an exchange and that I would be exchanged. Anyway, I knew I wouldn’t stay in prison that long. I had no doubt that I wouldn’t serve the entire sentence.

During one of the so-called investigative actions, an officer from the Russian Federation’s investigative committee stated that the Ukrainian side was imprisoning Russians for long periods under the accusation of ’illegal crossing of the State border by an organized group of armed persons in order to take part of the territory in favor of another State.’ In other words, long sentences are handed down for these acts and for war crimes, and consequently, for their military personnel to be exchanged, they say, they had to sentence us to equally long terms."

Do you know what happened to your fellow soldiers with whom you were captured?

“Two of them were exchanged at the end of 2022, and one of them unfortunately died later, defending our country and our freedom. Two others were exchanged this year. The others are still in captivity. None of them has been convicted. They have prisoner of war status.”

Based on your experience, what helped you survive captivity and return?

"I had no doubt that I was remembered, that people were trying to do everything to free me, that they were thinking of me, praying for me. I constantly tried to keep my mind occupied. I tried to summarize my previous experiences, to establish internal connections between what I believe, what I’m convinced of, and what I do.

I analyzed my life, tried to understand it. I thought about how to do things better, worked on my mistakes, prioritized the truly important things in my life, tried not to forget English and Ukrainian, wrote chronicles or speeches in my head, read them to myself, formulated thoughts, and remembered the people I had met in my life."

You are currently undergoing rehabilitation after your captivity. How is it going, what does it consist of, and how effective is it?

"It’s an interesting process. To be honest, I thought it would be faster and more formal. The rehabilitation process can be divided into four types of activities: the first is medical rehabilitation, examination, diagnosis to understand what the person has brought back with them from captivity in terms of possible pathologies; the second is psychological, psychologists work with you and try to bring you back to life in a freer context; the third is administrative, related to recovering stolen documents, all sorts of administrative things; and the fourth is, of course, collaboration with law enforcement and establishing the circumstances of captivity. They try to fit these four subjects into a quite short time frame, so the schedule is actually quite tight.

I’m now trying to determine where I can be most useful."

What do you plan to do after rehabilitation?

"I still have time to think about it. After captivity and the period of care, a person is entitled to 30 days of leave to recover. During this period, I will think about what I want to accomplish in the short term, or rather how to achieve it better and more effectively. I’m trying to determine where I will be most useful and in what status.

I’m not going to leave human rights work. It will stay with me for a long time, probably until the end of my life. It’s really an integral part of my life, and that’s why I’m going to continue doing it. Of course, I won’t abandon subjects related to forced migration, refugees, internally displaced persons, discrimination, xenophobia, and hatred. I realize today that more attention should be paid to analyzing propaganda and working on information, critical thinking, and perception of reality. But my priority in the near future will be the liberation of our military personnel and civilians from captivity."

[Biographical note]

Maksym Butkevych has been advocating for human rights for nearly 20 years. He was coordinator of the No Borders project and co-founder of the ZMINA human rights center and Hromadske Radio. For many years, he has been one of the organizers and hosts of screenings and events at the Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival.

This human rights activist has given lectures on human rights, hate speech, and refugees to journalists, activists, and government representatives in Ukraine and other countries. He worked at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Ukraine.

After the outbreak of full-scale war in March 2022, Butkevych joined the Ukrainian armed forces and was taken prisoner by Russia in June of the same year.

A criminal case was fabricated against Maksym Butkevych. On March 6, 2023, an illegal “court” in the temporarily occupied part of the Luhansk region sentenced the human rights activist and military officer to 13 years in prison for allegedly wounding two women by firing a grenade launcher into the entrance of a residential building while he was in Sievierodonetsk.

The Moscow Court of Appeal upheld the sentence but decided that part of the detention period - from August 19, 2022 - should be counted toward the sentence.

In March 2024, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation upheld the 13-year prison sentence for the captured human rights activist and soldier. During the hearing, he stated that he had been forced to incriminate himself under threat of torture. The Russian judges refused to include in the file evidence that Butkevich was not at the alleged crime scene at all, neither in Sievierodonetsk nor on the day indicated in the “file,” nor any other day of the war. The human rights activists’ statement that he incriminated himself due to promises of quick exchange and threats of torture was not taken into account.

Maksim Butkevich’s trial was condemned by Ukrainian human rights organizations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Memorial, PACE members, and other organizations.

The Russian association Memorial recognized Maksym Butkevych as a political prisoner.

In November 2022, Maksym Butkevych received the Czech History of Injustice award: his father, Alexander, received the award in Prague in place of his son. In 2023, Maksym Butkevych received the Anne Frank Award for Human Dignity and Tolerance, presented by the Netherlands Embassy in the United States, as well as the National Human Rights Award, presented by the Ukrainian Human Rights Agenda platform.