Russia and Ukraine have swapped 190 prisoners of war under a deal brokered by the United Arab Emirates.
The exchange late Friday saw each side release 95 prisoners.
Russia’s Ministry of Defence stated that returning Russian service members were undergoing medical checks in Belarus, one of Russia’s closest allies throughout the two-and-half-year conflict. A Russian military video showed smiling soldiers boarding buses.
A video posted on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Telegram account, meanwhile, showed men, some wrapped in the Ukrainian flag, getting off a bus and hugging loved ones.
“Every time Ukraine rescues its people from Russian captivity, we get closer to the day when freedom will be returned to all who are in Russian captivity,” the president said.
The UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs described the exchange as “a reflection of the cooperative and friendly relations between the UAE and both countries”. It was its ninth time mediating such an exchange between Moscow and Kyiv.
The Ukrainian president said the freed prisoners had served on various fronts, including those who had defended the port city of Mariupol for nearly three months in 2022.
There, they defended Mariupol and the Azovstal steelworks, which was widely viewed as a stealthy instance of resistance against Russia’s war. Mariupol has since been under Russian occupation.
“Ninety-five of our people are home again. These are the warriors who defended Mariupol and ‘Azovstal,’ as well as the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Kherson regions,” Zelenskyy wrote in a post on X.
Ukrainian media and human rights organisations reported that Ukrainian rights activist and service member Maksym Butkevych, who was convicted by a Russian court of shooting at Russian forces, was among those freed.
Forty-eight of the returnees had been handed sentences by the Russian judicial system, according to the body coordinating the affairs of prisoners of war.
Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian parliament’s commissioner for human rights, said the latest exchange was the 58th since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and brought to 3,767 the total number of prisoners returned home.
The swap follows the repatriation of the bodies of 501 soldiers to Ukraine earlier on Friday in what appeared to be the biggest repatriation of those killed during the conflict since the war broke out.
Most of those soldiers died while in action in the eastern Donetsk region of Ukraine, according to Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War.