Under the Geneva Convention, POW's are not to be humiliated, Ukraine put this guy in front of a porn star actress and had him badmouth Russia like he'd been worked over for years in the Hanoi Hilton... and then they just sent him back.
I fail to see the connection here. He's not Saudi royalty or something like that.
Ukraine violated his rights as a POW in making him a propaganda tool and thus it was up to them to make that right...
Again, it's not nearly as clear as you think. Note that this is from a different war and saner time:
Media organisations which show pictures of prisoners of war are not breaching the Geneva convention, international law experts confirmed yesterday. By Clare Dyers.
www.theguardian.com
Malcolm Shaw QC, professor of international law at Leicester University, said the article which says prisoners must be protected against insults and public curiosity had been understood to mean that states should not allow them to be shown publicly "in humiliating or insulting circumstances".
You are just taking the term "humiliated" to an extremely wide definition that is not necessarily reasonable. Badmouthing Russian military is not humiliating, millions of people volunteer to do that on social media all the time.
they absolutely didn't and now Wagner and Russia have a pretty effective propaganda video starring him of their own.
Propaganda videos for what purpose? For scaring existing members, they can (and do) make far better stunts anyway. For recruitment, i don't think that's helpful in the direction they think.
A) yep, Russia doesn't look good, but it's a drop in the bucket for the Kremlin and they DNGAF anyway, but Ukraine also doesn't look good and unlike Russia, if they fuck up too much with things like that, putting Elon Musk on their 'kill list' and so on and so forth... well... Ukraine ain't gonna reclaim its 2014 borders through its domestic MIC and would be paying 100% of their budget and then some if they had to actually buy the systems and ordinance they're using.
Again, i fail to see the connection here. What do the results of war have with keeping the most fanatical humanitarian NGO people happy?
Reiterating, the big supporting governments apparently don't care, and have historical precedents suggesting to not care too much.
B / C) Political asylum is irrelevant in this case since its the Ukrainian government that is the bad actor that had all the power in this instance. 99.9999% sure they targeted him specifically because he was convicted for murder since I think even you would have to admit to it not looking good if it was some 19 year old mobik who was getting executed by sledgehammer.
They have similar interviews with all sort of people, including normal mobiks. Obviously Wagner picked who are they going to publicly execute, not Ukraine.
The conclusion you want here requires considerable mental gymnastics to achieve.
You stand there, like in the meme, pointing at Wagner killing their penal legionnaire, asking "Why would Ukraine do this"?
Obviously Ukraine didn't do this, Wagner did. Ukraine is not responsible for what Russian state or its functionaries do to returned POWs. Unless you are implying Russia is run by children, they have plenty enough agency to take responsibility for own actions.
D) Yes, I know about Operation Keelhaul and some of the other skeevy realpolitik done when the USSR was a nominal ally, Ukraine and Russia are enemies though so... yeah... the implausible deniability the Western Allies had in handing over Soviet POWs to go straight to the gulag or worse
But... that made the optics worse? After all, the people Allies handed over nominally fought the same enemy at least. In case of Ukraine, they are enemy combatants, why would they give a shit, especially when they can get their own soldiers back in return, which is an incentive and duty that Western Allies didn't share in their exchanges? For all they know he got exchanged for a perfectly good soldier who would be getting starved and tortured until the end of war otherwise.
If you put that choice in a referendum in Ukraine, what do you think would be the result?
Hell, what do you think would be the result in supporting countries?
doesn't apply here and Ukraine should have held him for the duration of the conflict.
And that would achieve what exactly? If Russians want to kill him, they would do it later. The only thing that would change is some random Ukrainian POW would spend some months more in rather unpleasant Russian captivity.