On stage

TP

Tais Poda

Moderator · moderator

Yevhenii Malyk

Marine & ex-POW

Roman Hrybov

35th Marine Bde & ex-POW

GN

Gilly Norton

Supporting Wounded Veterans

The final panel addressed the specialised needs of returning prisoners of war and their families. Two former POWs, Mallik and Hrybov, described the psychological ordeal of captivity — particularly the fear of being wrongly listed as killed and the torment of not knowing whether they would be exchanged or killed. Norton shared UK experience with treatment-resistant trauma and medical trials of psychedelic-assisted therapy, and Poda discussed efforts to change Ukrainian policy so returnees and their families receive adequate mental-health care. Speakers stressed that veterans with lived experience are often best placed to help other former captives reintegrate.

The substance

Key takeaways

1

Two former prisoners of war testified that the cruelest dimension of captivity was not the physical hardship but the unbearable uncertainty — not knowing whether relatives believed them dead, whether they were even on an exchange list, or whether they would ever be released.

2

A returnee explained that being wrongly recorded as killed in action is uniquely destabilizing, because it can remove a prisoner from exchange consideration entirely — underscoring how information, and its denial, becomes a weapon in itself.

3

Both former captives argued that the people best able to help returning POWs are those who have lived the same experience, insisting that peer support from fellow survivors matters as much as clinical care in confronting the "inner enemy" many carry home.

4

Speaking from her own loss, a war widow and NGO leader described how families — mothers, sisters, wives — are left alone to carry both grief and paperwork, and argued the state does not yet do enough to search for the missing or to prepare and support families for the changed person who returns.

5

Reflecting on freedom, one former POW offered a broader warning: having seen an autocratic system from the inside, he argued that a system which imprisons people for their views ultimately consumes everyone, and that societies born into freedom often fail to grasp its price — making Ukraine's choice to live differently, in his view, unmistakably the right one.

In their words

Key quotes

“

We all desire freedom, we all think we understand it, but we don't understand the price we have to pay for it.

Yevgeniy Mallik

“

Physical torture is actually much easier to bear.

Roman Hrybov

“

There are certain traumas that are very hard to leave behind.

Jilly Norton

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