KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ten Ukrainians who had been held for years were released from Russian captivity on Friday with the mediation of the Vatican, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.
Part of the group arrived overnight by helicopter at Kiev’s international airport, which has been closed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It was the first time in more than two years that the airport received passengers. The rest of the group arrived by bus.
Some of the freed civilians had been captured before the Russian invasion. It is a rare occasion that people are detained after 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsulawere released.
Among those released was Nariman Dzhelyal, deputy head of the Mejlis, a representative body of the Crimean Tatars that was moved to Kiev after Russia seized the peninsula. He was taken from Crimea a year before the war, where he had been living despite the annexation.
“I was imprisoned, where many Ukrainians are still,” he said. “We can’t leave them there, because the conditions, both psychological and physical, are very frightening there.”
In the airport’s main hall, where pre-war advertisements still hang, former prisoners, draped in blue and yellow flags, reunited with their families and called those who could not be there. For some, the separation had lasted for years.
“I really want to hug you. I’ll be right there with you, Mom,” Isabella Pekh, the daughter of released art historian Olena Pekh, said via video call. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t meet you.”
For nearly six years, Isabella Pekh spoke at international conferences and appealed to foreign ambassadors for help in freeing her mother, who was being held in the occupied part of the Donetsk region. Ultimately, her efforts were successful.
“It was six years of hell that words cannot describe. But I knew I had my homeland, I had people who loved me, I had my daughter,” said Olena Pekh.
Among those who returned on Friday were two priests. One of them, Bohdan Heleta, was detained in 2022 in his church in the occupied city of Berdiansk in the Zaporizhia region.
According to the Ukrainian Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, 3,310 Ukrainians have already been released from Russian captivity. But many thousands, both civilians and military, remain imprisoned.
