KIEV.-Ukraine and Russia have each exchanged 95 prisoners of war, officials from both countries said Wednesday, three weeks after their last swap and as part of their occasional agreements to send captured soldiers home.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Russian Defense Ministry announced the exchange.
It was the 54th exchange since the start of the war in February 2002.
The authorities of the warring countries meet only when they exchange their dead and prisoners of war after lengthy preparation and diplomacy. Neither Ukraine nor Russia have revealed how many prisoners of war there are in total.
Zelensky said in a post on the Telegram messaging service that the United Arab Emirates brokered the deals. The Arab country has said it maintains friendly relations with Moscow and kyiv.
Zelensky posted photos of soldiers, many of them emaciated, with shaved heads and draped in Ukrainian flags, in what appears to be an open area in the countryside.
“No matter how difficult it may be, we are looking for all those who might be held captive. We need to return them all,” Zelenskyy wrote in the post.
Among the freed Ukrainians were some who spent more than two years in captivity. They were captured in Mariupol during the first offensive in the kyiv region and in battles in the Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian Main Coordination Office for Prisoners of War said.
The agency said that just over 3,400 people, including civilians and military personnel, have returned from captivity in Russia since the start of the war.
The Russian Defense Ministry said the freed Russian soldiers will be airlifted to Moscow for medical treatment and rehabilitation.
According to the UN, most Ukrainian prisoners of war suffer widespread medical neglect, severe and systematic ill-treatment and even torture while in detention. There have also been isolated reports of abuses against Russian soldiers, mainly during their capture or transit to internment sites.
Source: With information from AP