Ukraine, Russia announce largest prisoner swap since start of war

Ukraine and Russia have announced the largest exchange of prisoners since the start of the war, involving the return of more than 200 soldiers from each side in a deal mediated by the United Arab Emirates.

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said on January 3 in a message on social media, along with images of some of the freed PoWs: “230 of our people. Today, 213 soldiers and sergeants, 11 officers, and six civilians returned home”, The Guardian reports.

Zelenskyy said some of the returned soldiers had “fought in Mariupol and Azovstal”, referring to the siege of the Azovstal steel plant during the Ukrainian defence of Mariupol, a southern Ukrainian port city now occupied by Russia.

Russia’s defence ministry said in a statement that 248 Russian prisoners of war had been returned from Ukraine as a result of “complex” negotiations involving “humanitarian mediation” by the UAE.

Abu Dhabi, which retains friendly relations with Moscow, was last year similarly involved in helping mediate a sensitive prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine involving dozens of PoWs on each side.

Russia and Ukraine have periodically exchanged groups of prisoners in the course of the war, which is now in its 22nd month, but the swaps have become less frequent and the last took place in early August.

At the time, Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, Dmytro Lubinets, said 2,576 Ukrainians had been freed in prisoner swaps since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion.

More than 4,000 Ukrainian service personnel are believed to remain in captivity in Russia as prisoners of war, but the precise numbers of PoWs on the Ukrainian and Russian sides remain unknown as the military of neither country discloses such data.

Ukrainian families are often deprived of even elementary information about their location and wellbeing. Prisoners who have returned in exchanges have given extensive accounts of mistreatment, humiliation and torture in Russian captivity.

Russian proxy courts in eastern Ukraine have also handed out long-term prison sentences to Ukrainian soldiers in what human rights groups have described as “sham trials”.

January 3 prisoner swap comes after days of large-scale Russian airstrikes on Ukrainian cities that have killed dozens of civilians. Speaking on Ukrainian television, Yuri Ignat, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s air force, said Russia needed four days to prepare for new mass strikes on the country.

In its latest intelligence update, the British defence ministry said Russian forces had “committed a significant proportion of the stock of air-launched cruise and ballistic missiles” that Moscow had built up over recent months.

“The recent strikes likely primarily targeted Ukraine’s defence industry. This contrasts with its major attacks last winter which prioritised striking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure,” the ministry added.

Moscow on January 3 said it had shot down 12 Ukrainian missiles over Russia’s southern Belgorod region, as Kyiv appeared to step up its attacks on the region’s capital, the biggest Russian city close to the Ukrainian border.

The governor of the Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said the situation in the regional capital, also called Belgorod, “remained tense”.