KIEV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine and Russia have each exchanged 95 prisoners of war, officials in both countries said Wednesday, three weeks after their last exchange and as part of what were ad hoc agreements to send captured troops home.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Russian Defense Ministry reported on this.
The POW exchange was the 54th since Russia large scale invasion from its neighboring country in February 2022.
Officials from the warring countries meet only when exchanging their dead and prisoners of war, after lengthy preparation and diplomacy. Neither Ukraine nor Russia discloses the total number of prisoners of war.
Zelenskyy said in a message on the Telegram messaging service that the United Arab Emirates had again brokered the agreements. The UAE has said it maintains friendly relations with both Moscow and Kiev.
Zelenskyy posted photos of mostly thin soldiers with shaved heads and wrapped in Ukrainian flags, standing in what appeared to be an open stretch of countryside.
“No matter how difficult it is, we are looking for everyone who is in prison. We must bring everyone back,” Zelenskyy wrote in the post.
Among the released Ukrainians were some who had spent more than two years in captivity. They were captured in Mariupolduring the first Russian offensive in the Kiev region and fighting in the eastern Luhansk region, the country’s Prisoner of War Coordination Headquarters said.
According to the report, just over 3,400 people, both civilians and military, have returned from Russian captivity since the outbreak of the war.
The Russian Defense Ministry said the released Russian soldiers will be flown to Moscow for medical treatment and rehabilitation.
According to the UN, most Ukrainian POWs routinely suffer medical neglect, severe and systematic ill-treatment and even torture during detention. There are also isolated reports of ill-treatment of Russian soldiers, usually during capture or transport to internment camps.
Last January, Russia and Ukraine exchanged hundreds of prisoners of war, the largest single release of prisoners of war.
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