Russia and Ukraine announced Wednesday that they have conducted a prisoner of war exchange, despite tensions arising from a Russian military transport plane crash last week.
Russia’s defense ministry said each country exchanged 195 prisoners of war and that the Russian POWs would be flown to Moscow to receive medical and psychological treatment.
"On January 31, as a result of the negotiation process, 195 Russian servicemen who were in mortal danger in captivity were returned from territory controlled by the Kyiv regime,” the defense ministry said in a statement. “In return, exactly 195 prisoners from the armed forces of Ukraine were handed over.”
After the statement was released, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy took to X, formally known as Twitter, to share that 207 Ukrainians were freed. He noted that this was the 50th exchange since the war started nearly 2 years ago, raising the number of repatriated Ukrainian POWs to 3,035.
There was no immediate explanation for the different figures reported by each country.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow is open to more exchanges and that Kyiv has also indicated it was open to more. The Russian defense ministry was cited by the RIA state news agency saying that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) helped broker the exchange.
The swap comes after a military transport plane crashed last week with 65 Ukrainian POWs on board, according to the Russian defense ministry. Moscow claims the plane was shot down with a ground-to-air missile by Kyiv’s forces. Kyiv has not fully denied Moscow’s version of events, confirming that another prisoner swap was scheduled to take place but was called off. Kyiv also questioned the validity of whether Ukrainian POWs were aboard the downed jet. According to Moscow, all 74 people on board were killed.
Some information for this report came from Reuters and the Associated Press.
