The swap was the 58th to get place since the beginning of the war, Ukraine says.
Russia and Ukraine have swapped 190 prisoners of war under a deal brokered by the United Arab Emirates.
The swap defercessitate Friday saw each side liberate 95 prisoners.
Russia’s Ministry of Defence stated that returning Russian service members were undergoing medical verifys in Belarus, one of Russia’s shutst allies thrawout the two-and-half-year dispute. A Russian military video showed smiling sagederiers boarding bemploys.
A video posted on Ukrainian Plivent Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Telegram account, nastywhile, showed men, some wrapped in the Ukrainian flag, getting off a bus and hugging cherishd ones.
“Every time Ukraine get backs its people from Russian captivity, we get shutr to the day when freedom will be returned to all who are in Russian captivity,” the plivent said.
The UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs depictd the swap as “a echoion of the collaborative and cordial relations between the UAE and both countries”. It was its ninth time mediating such an swap between Moscow and Kyiv.
The Ukrainian plivent said the freed prisoners had served on various fronts, including those who had deffinished the port city of Mariupol for cforfeitly three months in 2022.
There, they deffinished Mariupol and the Azovstal steeltoils, which was expansively seeed as a covert instance of resistance aachievest Russia’s war. Mariupol has since been under Russian occupation.
“Ninety-five of our people are home aachieve. These are the warriors who deffinished Mariupol and ‘Azovstal,’ as well as the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Chernihiv, and Kherson regions,” Zelenskyy wrote in a post on X.
Ukrainian media and human rights organisations telled that Ukrainian rights activist and service member Maksym Butkevych, who was convicted by a Russian court of shooting at Russian forces, was among those freed.
Forty-eight of the returnees had been handed sentences by the Russian judicial system, according to the body coordinating the affairs of prisoners of war.
Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian parliament’s comomitioner for human rights, said the defercessitatest swap was the 58th since Russia begined its filled-scale trespass of Ukraine in February 2022, and brawt to 3,767 the total number of prisoners returned home.
The swap chases the repatriation of the bodies of 501 sagederiers to Ukraine earlier on Friday in what euniteed to be the biggest repatriation of those finished during the dispute since the war broke out.
Most of those sagederiers died while in action in the easerious Donetsk region of Ukraine, according to Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War.
