BREAKING: Ukraine, Russia hold largest prisoner swap since start of Russia's war

Editor's note: This is a developing story and is being updated.

Ukraine and Russia on May 23 began the largest exchange of prisoners of war (POWs) since the start of Russia's war in 2014, a Kyiv Independent journalist reported from the site of the swap.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Telegram that 390 Ukrainian prisoners had been exchanged as part of the first stage of the swap.

"We are bringing our people home. The first stage of the '1000-for-1000' exchange agreement has been carried out," Zelensky wrote. "Today – 390 people. On Saturday and Sunday, we expect the exchange to continue."

Russia's Defense Ministry said that 270 soldiers and 120 civilians had returned to Russia as part of the first stage.

The exchange will see 1,000 POWs from both sides return home, in a deal agreed upon during direct talks in Istanbul on May 16, the first such talks between Moscow and Kyiv since 2022.

"I thank everyone who is helping and working 24/7 to bring Ukrainian men and women back home. It is very important to return everyone who remains in captivity," Zelensky added.

The Ukrainian and Russian governments confirmed they had received the lists of POWs to be exchanged on May 22.

Zelensky announced on the same day that he held a meeting to prepare the exchange and called the agreement on the POW swap the only "real" result of the meeting between the two delegations in Istanbul.

"The agreement on the release of 1000 of our people from Russian captivity was almost the only real result of the meeting in Turkey. We are working to ensure this result. We are finding out the details of each person listed on the Russian side," Zelensky said.

People who hope for the return of their loved ones from captivity came to the exchange site expecting good news. Mariia Barkova, who has been waiting for her brother, a marine, to return from Russian captivity for four years, said she never misses a single exchange, and the news that this one would be the largest in history gave her new hope.

“When my friend’s son was exchanged, I got more hope. I believed it was possible to wait for the exchange to occur soon,” Barkova said.

Barkova added that their parents are under occupation and wait for their son to be exchanged.

“His brother is also waiting for him. He is a cancer patient,” Barkova said. “I share this information everywhere and hope one brother will help save the other.”

Inna Sokurina is also waiting for the return of a close family member — her son, a marine, who has been in Russian captivity for 37 months.

“We don’t know if he will be in the exchange, but we hope he will be. After all, today is Marine Corps Day (May 23),” Sokurina said.

Sokurina added that she came to the exchange for the first time because of its scale. “This is a large-scale exchange, 1,000 people. We decided that this could be a sign,” she said.

According to the President's Office chief Andriy Yermak, diplomatic representatives of the Nordic and Baltic countries also participated in preparations for the swap. He added that after the 1,000-for-1,000 exchange is completed, future direct talks with Russian officials could be arranged.

At least 8,000 Ukrainian service members are held captive by Russia, Iryna Vereshchuk, Presidential Office deputy head, said on May 1, citing data from Ukraine's Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of POWs.

Kyiv does not release the figures for how many Russian POWs are currently in Ukrainian custody.

While ceasefire agreements and peace talks have remained elusive since the start of the full-scale invasion, regular prisoner swaps have remained one of the few areas of ongoing cooperation between the two countries.

Ukraine has long advocated for an "all-for-all" exchange, but Russia has so far resisted the proposal.

The latest exchange included only soldiers, but Zelensky has previously said that Ukraine is working to return journalists and political prisoners from Russian captivity as well.

On May 20, the head of the Ukrainian National Union of Journalists, Serhii Tomilenko, handed over a list of Ukrainian media workers held in Russian captivity to the Vatican's ambassador to Ukraine, Visvaldas Kulbokas. According to the union, at least 31 Ukrainian journalists are being illegally detained by Russia.

Russia has a common practice of sentencing captured Ukrainian journalists to long prison terms on fabricated charges and holding them captive in harsh conditions under physical and psychological pressure, which in most cases amounts to torture, Yurii Vitrenko, a permanent representative of Ukraine to international organizations in Vienna, said on April 10 during a regular meeting of the OSCE Permanent Council.

Russian forces have also killed 103 media workers during the full-scale invasion, according to Ukraine's Culture Ministry.

Among those killed was Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna, whose body Ukraine brought back in April. Roshchyna's body showed signs of torture and was missing some internal organs, which may have been deliberately removed to obscure signs of suffocation or strangulation, according to an investigation by the Forbidden Stories journalism network.

Russia also illegally detains at least 16,000 Ukrainian civilians, of whom only 174 have been returned, according to Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets.

Lubinets stressed that a country that occupies the territory of another has no right to detain civilians, according to the Geneva Conventions. "Unfortunately, international humanitarian law does not answer the question of how to respond if Russia continues this illegal practice," he added.

Another area of Ukraine's efforts to bring back its citizens is related to the return of Ukrainian children.

Over 19,500 children have been forcibly deported to Russia, Belarus, or the occupied territories, according to government data. So far, only about 1,300 of them have been safely brought to Ukrainian government-controlled territory.

Ukrainian children forcibly taken to Russia or Russian-occupied territories are placed in families or Russian camps, where they are known to be subjected to intense anti-Ukrainian propaganda, and at times, military training.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has also taken up the matter. In March 2023, it issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Children's Rights Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova over their involvement in abductions.

On May 8, the European Parliament overwhelmingly passed a resolution condemning Russia's forcible deportation and Russification of Ukrainian children, calling it a "genocidal strategy" aimed at erasing Ukrainian identity and demanding the unconditional return of all abducted minors.

Editorial: Russia just said it doesn’t want peace. This is what you need to do

Russia is now saying the quiet part out loud. It has no intention of stopping the war in Ukraine. We in Ukraine knew this all along, of course, but to sate the demands of international diplomacy, Moscow and Washington have engaged in a now more than two-month-long peace process that

The Kyiv IndependentKyiv Independent