The latest prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine is scheduled for next week as already agreed with Russian officials, Ukraine’s intelligence chief has said, rebuking Moscow’s allegation that Kyiv had indefinitely postponed the swap.
“The start of repatriation activities based on results and negotiations in Istanbul is scheduled for next week, as authorised persons on Tuesday were informed,” military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov said in a statement on Sunday.
“Everything is moving according to plan, despite the enemy’s dirty information game”.
That barbed comment followed Russia’s pointed accusation on Saturday that Ukraine had indefinitely postponed the return of the bodies of 6,000 soldiers on each side and the exchange of wounded and seriously ill prisoners of war and prisoners of war under the age of 25.
Ukraine was “carefully adhering to the agreements reached in Istanbul”, Budanov countered, referring to a second round of negotiations that took place in the Turkish city on Monday.
Meanwhile, Russia said that it brought more than 1,000 bodies of slain Ukrainian soldiers to the exchange point while also handing over to Ukraine a first list of 640 prisoners of war, but that Ukrainian negotiators were not at the swap location. Ukraine denied the allegations and said Moscow should stop “playing dirty games”.
Melinda Haring, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, told Al Jazeera that it’s a good sign that the process seems to now be back on track.
“This is a big deal, because the prisoner exchange will be the largest that Ukraine and Russia have engaged in so far. And in the past, these exchanges have gone off pretty seamlessly,” Haring said. “So the fact that there were dual narratives about this in the middle of a big push at getting the Russians and the Ukrainians to agree on a peace negotiation was really troubling.
“POW [prisoner of war] exchanges are considered to be low-confidence ways of building trust in a bigger negotiation. So the fact that there was friction over this, and I believe it was on the Russian side, shows that there’s not a lot of interest in an actual peace negotiation on Moscow’s terms,” she said.
The two sides are no closer to any temporary ceasefire agreement as a concrete step towards ending the conflict despite some initial momentum from the United States, though US President Donald Trump appears to be losing patience in his campaign for a ceasefire, even suggesting the two be left to fight longer like children in a park before they be pulled apart.
Nor has Trump followed Ukraine’s European Union and United Kingdom allies in imposing harsher sanctions on Russia.
Fighting continues
The duelling narratives and fading diplomatic momentum remain the backdrop to the grinding war, now in its fourth year, as both sides ratchet up attacks against each other.
In the early hours of Sunday, Russia said it shot down 10 Ukrainian drones near the capital, Moscow, forcing two key airports to suspend their activities. That came a week after Ukraine conducted an audacious and unprecedented drone operation targeting nuclear-capable military aircraft in multiple airbases deep inside Russia, including in Siberia. Kyiv claims it destroyed 14 percent of Russia’s strategic bombers.
But Ukrainians have also been under heavy attack. In the past days, Russian forces have pounded the country, hitting multiple locations and killing more than a dozen civilians over the weekend, with Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv, the worst hit.
They have also made significant advances on the ground. Russia says its forces have entered Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region for the first time since the war began three years ago. The Russian Defence Ministry said tank units have reached the western border of the region and are continuing their offensive. The industrial region is home to three million people and includes the major city of Dnipro. Ukraine has not yet commented.
“It is significant because the region of Dnipropetrovsk is not one of the regions that Russia sees as now being part of the Russian Federation after the referendums that were held back in 2022,” said Al Jazeera’s Charles Stratford, reporting from Kyiv.
“Putin sees Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhia as being part of Russia – Dnipropetrovsk is not part of that plan. So if indeed these forces are crossing over into Dnipropetrovsk, that is hugely significant”.
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