CNN —
Two Americans who had been held by Russian-backed forces for more than three months were back on US soil Friday afternoon.
Americans Alexander John-Robert Drueke and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh arrived in New York City after being released in a Saudi Arabia-brokered prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine earlier this week. Their families said they believed the men were in good health.
“We know they speak, breathe, move and sound like themselves,” Darla Black, the mother of Huynh’s fiancé, told CNN on Friday.
The two men were captured in June while fighting for Ukraine near Kharkiv. Their pro-Russian captors, the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), is a Russian-backed, self-proclaimed republic that has ruled a breakaway part of Ukraine’s Donetsk region since 2014.
The families of Drueke and Huynh, CNN previously reported, had not spoken to the Alabama men during their months of detention until they received unexpected phone calls from the US embassy in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday.
“I have your son standing right next to me,” Bunny Drueke recalled as a woman from the US Embassy in Saudi Arabia who told her.
Little did the families know that the prisoner exchange was in the works.
“My mind just couldn’t grasp it because there had been no warning. It just came out of the blue,” Drueke’s mother told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
Huynh’s fiancee Joy Black told CNN’s Erin Burnett that Huynh ordered spaghetti with meat – a meal he’s craved since his days in Ukraine – as soon as he returns to Alabama.
Even after their capture, their families said the men said they had no regrets about defecting to the Ukrainians.
“Alex emphatically told me no, no regrets,” his aunt Dianna Shaw told CNN. “They really want people to understand that Ukraine needs our support. They need the support of all democratic nations. They need democracies that come together and push back (Russian President Vladimir) Putin.”
According to their separatist leaders, four Russian-held territories began voting in referenda on joining Russia on Friday, raising the stakes for the Moscow invasion. The referendums, illegal under international law and dismissed as bogus by Western governments and Kyiv, could pave the way for a Russian annexation of the territories and allow Moscow to portray Ukraine’s ongoing counter-offensive as an attack on Russia itself.
President Joe Biden said Friday the United States would never recognize Russia’s referenda in occupied parts of Ukraine.
“The United States will never recognize Ukrainian territory as anything other than a part of Ukraine. Russia’s referendums are a sham — a false pretext to try to forcibly annex parts of Ukraine in flagrant violation of international law, including the United Nations Charter,” Biden said in a statement.