[ad_1]
Two hundred and seventy Ukrainian military personnel and 120 civilians will be brought back to Ukraine after the Russian Ministry of Defense announced on Friday that Moscow and Kyiv exchanged this number of prisoners in the first round of a large -scale exchange.
Military management of Kyiv City/Anadolu via Getty Images
Hide the caption
Switch the image signature
Military management of Kyiv City/Anadolu via Getty Images
A city in northern Ukraine Ukraine and Russia began the exchange of 1,000 prisoners of war on Friday, the greatest such exchange since Ukraine in Russia began in February 2022.
“We bring our people home”, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on social mediaAfter the soldiers had driven to Ukraine. Shortly after crossing, he posted several photos of the liberated Ukrainians, who were draped many in the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag.
He said 390 people were included in the first of a three -day exchange. “This agreement was made at a meeting in Turkey,” he added, “and it is important to implement it completely.”
The Ukrainian authorities asked NPR not to reveal the location for security concerns. An area with so many Ukrainian soldiers and civilians who are gathered in one place could be exposed to a strike risk.
This Pow exchange was the only deal in Istanbul last week during the first direct negotiations by the two countries about an armistice since the early days of the Russia 2022 invasion.
Even before the exchange was announced on Friday, President Trump went to Say social media It was completed.
According to the Ukrainian authorities, 270 soldiers and 120 civilians were included in the exchange on Friday.
Zelenskyy’s office said at the beginning of this month that more than 8,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been estimated by Russia since the start of the full invasion in February 2022. According to the Ukrainian human rights officials, there are also more than 16,000 Ukrainian civilians in Russian captivity.
One of these civilians is Volodymyr Mykolayenko, the former mayor of the southern city of Kherson. His niece Hanna Corsun-Samchuk told NPR that the Russian armed forces had taken him away after filling the city for several months in 2022.
“I tried to address the problem of civil prisoners because there is no simple procedure for the exchange,” she said on Monday in an interview in Khleson.
Dozens of Ukrainian families were waiting for hours in a blatthof for the freed -of -life prisoners of war, in the hope that their relatives are among them. They kept banners, flags and posters decorated with pictures of their loved ones, all soldiers.
Katya Kobel, who comes from the northern city of Chernihiv, cried when she spoke about her husband Hryhori, who has been in Russian captivity since December 2023. She said he was captured in the eastern Donetsk region after receiving text messages with photos of her husband from a Russian number.
“They told me: ‘We caught your husband,’,” she said.
Natalia Apetyk hopes that her 23-year-old son Yelizar will finally come home. He has been in Russian captivity since 2022 when he was captured before a Russian idea when defending eastern Ukraine.
“Today it has been exactly three years since his last call, and tomorrow it will be three years ago since he disappeared,” she said.
18-year-old Milena Moroz organizes a photo of her father Yevhen, who was captured in East Ukraine in February this year. She says she didn’t see her father as much as she would have liked it because her parents were divorced.
She is waiting to tell him something important, something she wanted him to have told him more often: “I love you, Papa.”
Hanna Palamarenko from NPR contributed to this report by Kyiv.