Ukraine
Both sides released more than 200 soldiers in the first exchange since August after negotiations brokered by the UAE
Ukraine and Russia have announced the largest prisoner exchange since the war began, including the return of more than 200 soldiers from both sides under a deal brokered by the United Arab Emirates.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a message on social media on Wednesday along with pictures of some released prisoners of war: “230 of our people. Today 213 soldiers and non-commissioned officers, 11 officers and six civilians returned home.”
Zelensky said some of the returned soldiers “fought in Mariupol and Azov Valley,” referring to the siege of the Azov Valley steel mill during Ukraine's defense of Mariupol, a southern Ukrainian port city now occupied by Russia.
The Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement that 248 Russian prisoners of war were returned from Ukraine as a result of “complex” negotiations with “humanitarian mediation” by the UAE.
Abu Dhabi, which has friendly relations with Moscow, also helped broker a sensitive prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine last year involving dozens of prisoners of war on both sides.
Russia and Ukraine have exchanged groups of prisoners regularly over the course of the war, now in its 22nd month, but the exchanges have become less frequent and the last one took place in early August.
At the time, Ukraine's human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said that 2,576 Ukrainians had been released in prisoner exchanges since Russia's large-scale invasion began.
It is believed that more than 4,000 Ukrainian military personnel remain held as prisoners of war in Russia. However, the exact number of prisoners of war on the Ukrainian and Russian sides remains unknown as the military of neither country discloses such data.
Ukrainian families are often withheld even basic information about their whereabouts and well-being. Prisoners who returned in exchange have reported extensively on abuse, humiliation and torture in Russian captivity.
“It is the time when you should be with your family”: the ongoing plight of Ukrainian prisoners of war
Russian proxy courts in eastern Ukraine have also handed down long prison sentences to Ukrainian soldiers in what human rights groups called “sham trials.”
Wednesday's prisoner exchange comes after days of large-scale Russian airstrikes on Ukrainian cities that killed dozens of civilians. Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yuri Ignat said on Ukrainian television that Russia needed four days to prepare for new mass attacks on the country.
Britain's Ministry of Defense said in its latest intelligence report that Russian forces had “deployed a significant portion of the inventory of air-launched cruise and ballistic missiles” that Moscow had built up in recent months.
“Recent attacks likely targeted Ukraine's defense industry primarily. This is in contrast to the major attacks last winter, where attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure were a priority,” the ministry added.
Moscow said on Wednesday it had fired 12 Ukrainian missiles over Russia's southern Belgorod region, while Kiev appeared to step up its attacks on the region's capital, the largest Russian city near the Ukrainian border.
The governor of the Belgorod region, Vyacheslav Gladkov, said the situation in the regional capital, also known as Belgorod, “remains tense.”
Last week, Russia said the Ukrainian shelling of Belgorod killed 25 people, including five children, making it one of the deadliest attacks on Russian soil since Moscow's full-scale invasion.
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