Ukrainian journalist Dmytro Khyliuk’s captivity in russia: Reporters Without Borders receives new evidence of him being alive

According to testimony from a recently released Ukrainian serviceman collected by Reporters Without Borders (RWB), Dmytro Khyliuk is still being held in russia’s Vladimir Oblast. While prisoner exchanges between russia and Ukraine have increased in recent months, RWB is demanding the unconditional release of the journalist, who has been imprisoned without charge for more than three years since his arrest at the start of a large-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The organization’s website reports that Dmytro Khyliuk is alive. The journalist was captured on March 3, 2022, in the garden of his family home north of Kyiv. He has been held in russia since then. Dmytro was last seen in early May 2025 by a recently released Ukrainian serviceman named Vlad, whom RWB was able to interview. This soldier from the 36th Marine Brigade, who was captured in the first weeks after the invasion, was transferred in October 2022 to the IK-7 penal colony in Pakino, located in the Vladimir Oblast, several hundred kilometers east of Moscow. According to information obtained by RWB, Dmytro Khyliuk was brought there a year later, in May 2023. In August of that year, the two men briefly shared a cell for one day.

That day, the journalist for the Ukrainian news agency UNIAN remained silent. His cell number 8 is located in the third and last block, the “toughest,” according to Vlad. He reports that Ukrainian prisoners there, both civilians and military, are regularly beaten and deprived of food, confirming information that RWB has already gathered from several former prisoners. One of them, who spent a year in the same cell as the journalist, told RWB after his release that Dmytro Khyliuk had become unrecognizable compared to the photos taken before his arrest. At the time, he weighed, he said, no more than 45 kilograms, an estimate that Vlad still believes is valid.

According to Vlad, conditions improved somewhat in late 2024 after a delegation led by Tatyana Moskalkova, the russian Federation’s human rights commissioner, visited the Pakino prison. But the situation deteriorated again in 2025. Food has become worse, and access to medical care remains very limited, especially for the treatment of scabies, which regularly spreads in prison. About 300 Ukrainians are still imprisoned there.

In early May 2025, shortly before his release, Vlad unexpectedly encountered Dmytro Khyliuk in the prison corridor. The journalist appeared to be on his way to the doctor. At the time, he had no visible signs of beatings or injuries.

The National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU) demands the immediate and unconditional release of journalist Dmytro Khyliuk and 30 other civilian media workers who are being held in detention by russia in violation of international law.