CHERNIHIV, Ukraine ― Ukraine and Russia started their largest prisoner-of-war exchange on Friday, trading 390 prisoners in a swap that will continue on Saturday and Sunday.
Friday’s POW exchange was the first batch of a 1,000-prisoner swap that both sides agreed on at the first direct talks between the two countries in three years, pushed by U.S. President Donald Trump.
Kyiv kept the process highly secretive due to safety concerns for the first 270 soldiers and 120 civilians, who were about to be swapped on the border with Belarus.
In the northern Ukraine city of Chernihiv, hundreds of women and children were anxiously waiting for signs that their loved ones would soon return to them.
Then Trump woke up in Washington.
“A major prisoner swap was just completed between Russia and Ukraine. It will go into effect shortly. Congratulations to both sides on this negotiation. This could lead to something big???” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday.
In reality, the first stage of the prisoner swap had not even started when Trump posted his message.
“[Trump] wanted to be the first to break the news about it,” a Ukrainian official told POLITICO on condition of anonymity. “Fortunately, [Trump’s rushed post] did not have any effect,” the official said. “But we usually do not report on the ongoing exchanges, as you never know with Russians. Our boys were too close to the enemy.”
Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s defense minister, thanked Trump for his assistance in achieving the swap, as Kyiv is still trying to keep the U.S. president in efforts to broker peace in Ukraine.
This prisoner swap has become the only big success of Trump-brokered direct negotiations between Russia and Ukraine. The first night of the exchange, Russia attacked Ukraine with 250 drones and 14 ballistic missiles, while claiming that it would present its own version of a peace proposal after the end of the POW exchange. Ukraine attacked Russia with 94 drones the same night.
‘Thank you, heroes’
Several hours before the attack, hundreds of women, men and children roared with joy as they saw the first buses arriving at a meeting spot. For some of the crowd, that day would have become either the happiest day of their lives if they recognized their loved ones in the sea of underfed, exhausted and traumatized faces and shaved heads of former Russian prisoners. Or it would be yet another tragedy if they don’t.
Some people were happy, waving flags and screaming “Thank you, heroes,” while others showed the newly arrived soldiers the portraits of their loved ones who could not be found.
“Almost six months of obscurity. We came here with the hope that at least someone might have seen him in Russian prisons. Maybe some of them will recognize him from a photo, or maybe they have heard his last name,” said Liubov Zabrodina, whose husband went missing at the war front in December 2024.
As the buses stop and the first soldiers come out, there’s a happy scream heard nearby, where Tetiana, a young woman waving the Ukrainian marines’ flag, sees the face of her husband.
“I haven’t seen him since 2022, since Mariupol. I did not know, my friends told me. I can’t tackle my emotions. My heart is in my toes,” Tetiana happily screams as a tired hand waves at her from the bus.
Most of the 390 Ukrainian prisoners released on Friday had been in prison for three years. As they came out of the buses, some were ushered to a hospital for treatment.
But some stayed to look at the hundreds of pictures of others, who are missing, like Zabrodina’s husband. For many, they are the only light of hope. Russia still does not disclose the exact number of prisoners it has captured in Ukraine.
National Guard soldier Vitaly did not recognize anyone in those pictures. Nervously smoking next to a bus, he admits he did not believe he would soon be free, even though there were signs.
“They let us bathe for 20 minutes instead of the usual five. They gave us new clothes. But I still refused to believe until we landed in Gomel [a city in Belarus near the border with Ukraine],” Vitaly said. “Russians liked to trick us while transferring between the prisons. They told us they were going home. But we weren’t. I guess it was funny to them,” the soldier, who spent 22 months in Russian prisons, added.
As Vitaly was figuring out how to get a new phone and call his wife, Ukraine was preparing for the second day of the swap on Saturday.
While hundreds of mothers and daughters will come up again to an undisclosed location in Chernihiv with hope, more than 8,000 Ukrainians illegally kept in Russian prisons are waiting for their turn to be freed.
The post Trump rushes to announce largest Russia-Ukraine POW swap of the war appeared first on Politico.
