“I have very good news,” beamed former Ukrainian POW and human rights activist Maksym Butkevych, looking up from his phone. “150 Ukrainian prisoners of war have just been released. One is from my platoon.”
This is how I learned about last week’s prisoner exchange during a train ride from Champaign to Chicago. In addition to the 150 Ukrainian defenders, seven citizens were released on February 5 in an exchange with Russia.
Maksym Butkevych
Butkevych, the 2025 Václav Havel Human Rights Prize recipient, was my seatmate on the train. He had been held in Russian captivity for two and a half brutal years. He was released in a prisoner exchange in October 2024.
He wore a black sweatshirt with white lettering: “Ukrainian POW You are not forgotten.”
Butkevych was on the Amtrak train between talks at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Chicago when he heard the news of the latest swap.
Butkevych, 48, had become a volunteer platoon commander for the Ukrainian Armed Forces after the Russian invasion in Feb. 2022. He and eight members of his platoon were ambushed and taken into captivity in June of that year, during the battle of Sievierodonetsk in eastern Ukraine. The long-time human rights activist and journalist, who had worked with the BBC and Amnesty International, was later charged by the Russians as a British spy, propagandist, and war criminal. He was forced to make false video and written confessions. He was sentenced to 13-years imprisonment. All part of a well-tuned Russian propaganda show.
In an NPR interview following his release in 2024, he described beatings, torture, and forced re-education. In Russia, he said, “people are disposable material, are valued only when they serve the state.” Russian disregard for human rights along with contempt for international law is well documented. A December 2025 OSCE report noted “widespread and systematic use of torture against Ukrainian POWS,” denial of POW status, inhumane detention conditions, and arbitrary killings.
As we rode the train, his “first American train ride,” Maksym and I talked about the cities he’d visited in the US, the book his friend (another released Ukrainian POW) was writing, the weather (when unspeakable topics created pauses), and the theatre. The theatre in Mariupol. (Unspeakable pause.) The theatres in Kyiv, his hometown.
“It’s hard to get tickets, actually,” he said of performances in Kyiv, where he’d return in a few days. As a theatre scholar, I’ve been thinking about the role of theatre in such times.
I told Maksym about The Reckoning by Dash Arts in London, written by Anastasiia Kosodii and Josephine Burton, based on testimonials of war crimes documented by the journalists of The Reckoning Project. We talked about the importance of the court of public opinion and keeping the European and American public focused on supporting Ukrainians, devastated by years of Russian brutality and efforts at dehumanization. The theatre continues to play a role in the defense against this attack. Kyiv’s Theatre of Playwrights, for example, works with the Center for International Theatre Development to build solidarity and support for Ukraine across cultures, to document traumatic events, and to cultivate community and care.
Maksym, too, has been focused on cultivating community and care—for released Ukrainian POWs. As co-founder of the charitable organization Principle of Hope, he works to help those released from captivity and facilitate their reintegration. Part of his mission includes keeping the international community aware of these POWs and engaged in efforts for their release.
The most recent prisoner exchange of 314 prisoners between Russia and Ukraine on February 5 marked the most tangible result of diplomatic efforts between the US, Russia, and Ukraine in months. A cause for celebration, certainly, for those released and their families and friends. Nevertheless, more than 6,000 Ukrainian POWs are thought to be in captivity in likely inhumane conditions.
Of course, providing Ukraine with air-defense weapons and other supports that will pressure Russia to negotiate to end the war in earnest, is the best way to save lives from Russian aggression. But as The Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum pointed out this week on Substack, the war has grown more deadly since Trump returned to office. Russian attacks on civilians and infrastructure are wreaking devastation in a dangerously cold Ukrainian winter.
Maksym described the bitter cold. He spoke of the warming stations where families could go for a few hours of warmth in areas where electricity had been completely shut off for weeks. I thought about how I’d prepared for a major winter storm just a few weeks ago, relieved that the power hadn’t shut down. My cell phone had stayed charged. The water kept running.
Walking through Chicago’s Union Station with a former Ukrainian POW and waving goodbye as he finally got to have that cigarette on the street corner, I couldn’t help feeling awe and a sense of responsibility. A responsibility to remember.
Ukrainian POW, You are not forgotten.
Valleri Robinson is an Eastern European theatre scholar focusing on performance in precarious times. She is the Department Head for Theatre at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an affiliate faculty member of the Slavic Languages and Literatures. Department.
Demonstrators rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court as justices hear oral arguments on whether President Donald Trump can deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
Luz Angela Nuñez with her daughter Aisha Quershi Nuñez at their home in College Point, Queens. Photo: Mia Anzalone for Documented.
Kimberly Alvarez, 25, with her daughter Evangeline and her husband John Alvarez in Medellin, Colombia. Photo courtesy of Kimberly Alvarez.Alvarez arrived in New York City in February 2024 with her husband John Alvarez as asylum seekers from Venezuela. In April 2025, Alvarez found out she was pregnant with her first child, a baby girl. Her first reaction, she said, was fear.“How am I going to keep her alive?” she said. “That’s what I was thinking. ‘How am I going to be able to take care of her?’”At the beginning of Alvarez’s pregnancy, she said she was aware of the immigration enforcement occurring around the country, but vowed not to let it deter her from showing up to her doctor’s appointments.“When you went out, you were always on alert because you didn’t know if [ICE] might be around. I never saw anything suspicious,” Alvarez said. “But of course, you feel scared.”In October, when Alvarez was six months pregnant, her husband was detained by ICE agents at 26 Federal Plaza. When the immediate shock wore off, she obsessively checked the Online Detainee Locator System to find out where her husband went. A day later, she discovered that he was being kept at Delaney Hall detention center in New Jersey. Alvarez quickly set up an account to pay for phone calls, and every two days, she would pay about $10 for a one-hour call, updating her husband about the baby, her appointments and how she was doing.“Crying was the only way for me to release the tension,” said Alvarez, who worried that her lack of sleep and bad diet were impacting her baby. “Crying was the only way for me to release the tension.”—Kimberly AlvarezThat tension built up day by day, week by week following her husband’s arrest. Alvarez had stopped her work as a cleaner in the neighborhood’s synagogues two weeks before her husband’s detention because of her pregnancy. The plan, she said, was to rely solely on his income as a maintenance worker for “the food, the rent, everything.” Left with few choices, Kimberley had to rely on her mother’s income as a cleaner. The older woman had moved to New York from North Carolina to assist with Alvarez’s pregnancy. “I feel like I’m supposed to help my mom, not the other way around,” Alvarez said. “I felt powerless because I couldn’t do anything.”On Dec. 9, Alvarez gave birth to a daughter, Evangeline. While her baby was healthy, Alvarez’s anxieties did not go away. While she returned to cleaning synagogues a few months after Evangeline’s birth to help make ends meet, Alvarez and her daughter rarely left home. Alvarez said she felt paralyzed, getting frequent alerts from a neighborhood WhatsApp group when ICE was spotted nearby. One day, she said, ICE arrested her friend’s husband in Sunset Park, in an area where she would sometimes take Evangeline for walks.“I’m so afraid that I’ll go out and run into one of them and that they’ll take her away from me,” Alvarez said. “That’s my biggest fear, that someone will take her away from me and I won’t know where my daughter is.”In March, her husband decided to voluntarily remove himself from the United States and move back to Colombia, where he is originally from. It was a family decision, but it was not a happy one — hiring immigration lawyers was too expensive, Alvarez said, adding that staying in the U.S. felt too uncertain.