Ukraine and Russia exchange 95 prisoners of war from each side

(Bloomberg) — Ukraine and Russia each exchanged 95 of their soldiers in the first significant return of prisoners of war in more than a month, according to statements by authorities in both countries.

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The exchange took place under the mediation of the United Arab Emirates, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement on Friday.

More than half of the repatriated Ukrainian soldiers were sentenced to Russia: 28 to long prison terms and 20 to life imprisonment, the headquarters of the kyiv Coordination for the Treatment of Prisoners of War said on Saturday.

The soldiers included those who served during the siege of Mariupol in the first months of the war, as well as in the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, kyiv, Chernihiv and Kherson regions, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a message on x.

kyiv and Moscow have carried out dozens of prisoner swaps since the start of Russia’s large-scale invasion, now in its third year. This latest exchange adds to the more than 3,600 captured soldiers who were returned to Ukraine during the war, according to Ukraine’s Prisoner of War Processing Headquarters.

Friday’s exchange followed a major exchange of prisoners of war negotiated by the United Arab Emirates in mid-September. This allowed 152 Ukrainian men and women to return home, according to Dmytro Lubinets, human rights commissioner of the Ukrainian parliament.

Ukraine has not disclosed the exact number of its citizens detained in Russia. In January, kyiv reported that around 8,000 Ukrainians were considered prisoners of war, including more than 1,600 civilians, according to Interfax Ukraine. In June, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that 6,465 Ukrainian soldiers were detained by Russia and 1,348 Russian servicemen by Ukraine. These claims could not be independently verified.

–With the help of Daryna Krasnolutska.

(Updates with Ukraine’s statement in third paragraph)

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