Russia and Ukraine exchanged over 100 prisoners of war each on Saturday as Kyiv marked its third Independence Day since Moscow’s full-scale invasion.
Ukraine said the 115 Ukrainian servicemen who were freed were conscripts, many of whom were taken prisoner in the first months of Russia’s invasion. Among them are nearly 50 soldiers captured by Russian forces from the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol.
The Russian Defense Ministry said the 115 Russian soldiers had been captured in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces launched their surprise offensive into Russia two weeks ago. The ministry said the soldiers were currently in Belarus, but would be taken to Russia for medical treatment and rehabilitation.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a post on X that the United Arab Emirates had again brokered the exchange, the 55th since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbor in February 2022.
I don’t think they will be thrown back into daily life. Either you play ball with the ideological story and tell stories of mistreatment and brutality, or you go to a storm Z unit. Especially if you surrendered without a fight.
But that’s my expectation.
That’s pretty much how I expect things to go as well. Russians have a long history of imprisoning and outright murdering any POWs returning to Russia – they know the stories the POWs have would run counter to the bullshit they’re fed, so it’s easier to just get rid of the POWs if they don’t toe the line.
And it’s not like this is the first prisoner exchange that’s happened during this war. If released POWs were actually capable of changing the narrative, they’d probably already have done so.