(Bloomberg) — Ukraine and Russia exchanged 95 of their soldiers each in the first major prisoner of war return in more than a month, according to statements from authorities in the two nations.
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The exchange was mediated by the United Arab Emirates, Russia’s Defense Ministry said in a statement on Friday.
More than half of the Ukrainian soldiers that were returned had been sentenced in Russia: 28 to long-term prison sentences and 20 to life imprisonment, Kyiv’s Coordination headquarters on POW treatment said in a statement on Saturday.
The soldiers included those who had served in the siege of Mariupol in the early months of the war, as well as in the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Kherson regions, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a post on X.
Kyiv and Moscow have conducted dozens of prisoner exchanges since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, which is now well into its third year. The latest swap adds to the more than 3,600 captured soldiers who’ve been returned to Ukraine over the course of the war, according to Ukraine’s POW treatment headquarters.
Friday’s swap followed a major prisoner of war exchange mediated by the UAE in mid-September. That saw 152 Ukrainian men and women returned home, according to Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian parliament’s human rights commissioner.
Ukraine hasn’t released exact numbers of its citizens being held in Russia. In January, Kyiv reported that about 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 held by Russia and 1,348 Russian service members by Ukraine. These claims couldn’t be independently verified.
–With assistance from Daryna Krasnolutska.
(Updates with statement from Ukraine in the third paragraph)
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