Cairo: Russia and Ukraine carried out a new exchange of prisoners of war on Friday, each side bringing home 95 prisoners in an agreement in which the United Arab Emirates acted as mediator.

Russia’s Defence Ministry, in a post on the Telegram messaging app, said the returning Russian service members were undergoing medical checks in Belarus, one of Russia’s closest allies in the more than 2-1/2-year-old war.

Video posted on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s Telegram account showed men, some wrapped in the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag, getting off a bus well after dark and being embraced by loved ones. A Russian military video showed smiling soldiers boarding buses.

“Every time Ukraine rescues its people from Russian captivity, we get closer to the day when freedom will be returned to all who are in Russian captivity,” Zelenskiy wrote. The president said the freed prisoners had served on various fronts, including some who had defended the port city of Mariupol for nearly three months in 2022.

Ukrainian news reports said the returnees included Ukrainian journalist and rights advocate Maksym Butkevych, convicted by a Russian court of shooting at Russian forces.

The body coordinating the affairs of prisoners of war said 48 of the returnees had been handed sentences by the Russian judicial system.

Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian parliament’s commissioner for human rights, said the release was the 58th since the beginning of the war and brought to 3,767 the total number of prisoners returned home.

A private Russian group that says it looks after the interests of prisoners of war published a list of returnees and said most of them were captured in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces staged an incursion in August.

In his remarks, Zelenskiy again referred to soldiers in that operation who “replenish the exchange fund”, meaning the capture of Russian prisoners to be used as a bargaining chip in exchanges.

Published in Dawn, October 20th, 2024