Ukraine and Russia announced the largest prisoner swap since the war began, with each side repatriating more than 200 soldiers brokered by the United Arab Emirates.
“We have 230 people,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a post on social media on Wednesday along with photos of some of the released prisoners. “Today, 213 soldiers and sergeants, Eleven officers and six civilians returned home.”
Zelensky said some of the returning soldiers “fought in Mariupol and Yazovstar,” referring to Ukraine’s defense of Mariupol, a southern Ukrainian port city now occupied by Russia. Siege of the Zofstal Steel Works.
The Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement that 248 Russian prisoners of war had been repatriated from Ukraine after “complex” negotiations with “humanitarian mediation” in the United Arab Emirates.
Abu Dhabi maintains friendly relations with Moscow and last year was involved in mediating a sensitive prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine, which held dozens of prisoners of war on both sides.
The war has entered its 22nd month. Russia and Ukraine regularly exchanged prisoners of war during the war, but the exchanges are no longer so frequent, with the last exchange being in early August.
At the time, Ukraine’s human rights monitor Dmytro Lubinets said that 2,576 Ukrainians had been released through prisoner exchanges since Russia’s full-scale invasion.
It is believed that more than 4,000 Ukrainian servicemen are still held as prisoners of war in Russia, but the exact number of prisoners of war on both sides remains unknown because neither country’s military has disclosed such data.
Ukrainian families are often deprived of basic information about their location and well-being. Exchange prisoners who returned home detailed the abuse, humiliation and torture they endured while in Russian captivity.
A Russian proxy court in eastern Ukraine also sentenced Ukrainian soldiers to long prison terms in what rights groups called a “sham trial”.
Wednesday’s prisoner exchange comes after days of massive Russian air strikes on Ukrainian cities, killing dozens of civilians. Speaking on Ukrainian television, Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yuri Ignat said Russia needed four days to prepare for a new large-scale attack on the country.
The British Ministry of Defense said in its latest intelligence update that the Russian military had “committed much of the stockpile of air-launched cruise missiles and ballistic missiles that Moscow has accumulated in recent months”.
“The latest attacks may mainly target Ukraine’s defense industry. This is in sharp contrast to major attacks last winter, which focused on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure,” the ministry added.
Moscow said on Wednesday it shot down 12 Ukrainian missiles over Russia’s southern Belgorod region, as Kiev appeared to step up attacks on the regional capital, Russia’s largest city near the Ukrainian border.
Belgorod Region Governor Vyacheslav Gradkov said the situation in the regional capital Belgorod “remains tense.”
Russia said last week that Ukrainian shelling of Belgorod killed 25 people, including five children, in one of the deadliest attacks on Russian soil since Moscow’s full-scale invasion.
