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Ukraine and Russia have carried out one of their largest exchanges of prisoners of war – 190 people in total –following negotiations mediated by the United Arab Emirates.
Ukrainian PoWs were filmed arriving in coaches at an undisclosed location in Ukraine on Wednesday, before being draped in national flags and chanting, “Glory to Ukraine, glory to the heroes.” Footage released by Ukraine’s commission for human rights also showed multiple soldiers holding emotional phone calls with their families, the first time they had spoken to relatives since being captured, while another man was pictured in tears collapsing onto the ground.
Footage released by the Russian ministry of defence also showed soldiers arriving back in Russia, though they appeared less visibly relieved to have been freed.
Ukraine’s Coordinating Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War (CHTP) reported that many of the returning soldiers bore the marks of injury during detainment and had “chronic diseases that require long-term treatment”.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky thanked the UAE for its help over the exchange. “No matter how difficult it may be, we are looking for everyone who may be in captivity,” he wrote on the Telegram messenger app. “We have to return everyone.”
THe CHTP reported that among those swapped were 23 people who had defended the southern city of Mariupol captured by Russian in May 2022, 13 of whom had been holed up in the Azovstal Steel Plant that was razed to the ground by constant shelling. One of those men was a volunteer who was captured on an evacuation mission after the Russians had surrounded the steelworks.
It is the 54th exchange of prisoners since the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s invasion in February 2022 and the third in seven weeks. A total of 3,405 Ukrianians have been returned from Russia.
“Now, the returned soldiers will eat, receive clean clothes, be examined by doctors, and the necessary treatment and rehabilitation will be prescribed,” Ukraine’s human rights commissioner Dmytro Lubinets wrote on Telegram.
At the start of this year, Russia claimed that Ukraine shot down a transport plane that was carrying Ukrainian PoWs, though they did not provide evidence. The Russian MoD labelled the incident a terrorist attack but refused to allow independent investigators to look into what happened. The incident caused concern that Russia would suspend prisoner swaps until president Vladimir Putin, in quotes cited by state media outlet Tass, suggested that such a move was unlikely because “we have to bring our own guys back home”.
A few months later, in May, Russian human rights commissioner Tatyana Moskalova, in quotes again cited by Tass, claimed that they would suspend prisoner swaps for several months. She blamed what she called Kyiv’s “false demands” as the reason for the alleged cancellation.
