Russia-Ukraine prisoner swap: UAE mediates 146 releases per side

Russia and Ukraine conducted another large-scale prisoner exchange on Sunday, with 146 service members returned by each side, according to the Russian defense ministry and the Ukrainian president. The exchanges, mediated by the United Arab Emirates, continued a pattern that has produced hundreds of released prisoners over the past year and stood as one of the few tangible channels of cooperation between Moscow and Kyiv since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. In addition to the bilateral swap, eight Russian citizens from the Kursk region, who had been detained by Kyiv, were also released.

The Russian ministry said the 146 freed Russians were being held in Belarus, where they were receiving psychological and medical assistance, while the Ukrainian side repatriated 146 Ukrainian servicemen. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed the exchange in a post on a messaging app, sharing photographs of returnees and noting that several had been in captivity since the early days of the war. Among those released, he said, was a journalist taken prisoner in March 2022, and a former Kherson mayor who had spent more than three years in captivity. Zelenskyy expressed gratitude to the UAE...