A CITY IN NORTHERN UKRAINE — Ukraine and Russia began the exchange of 1,000 prisoners of war Friday, the largest such swap since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
"We are bringing our people home," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on social media, after the soldiers had crossed into Ukraine. Shortly after they had crossed, he posted several photos of the freed Ukrainians, many draped in the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag.
He said 390 people were included in the first of a three-day exchange. "This agreement was reached at a meeting in Turkey," he added, "and it is important to fully implement it."
The Ukrainian authorities asked NPR not to disclose the location out of security concerns. An area with so many Ukrainian soldiers and civilians gathered in one place could be at risk of a strike.
This POW exchange was the only deal made in Istanbul last week during the two countries' first direct negotiations about a ceasefire since the early days of Russia's 2022 invasion.
Even before the exchange was announced on Friday, President Trump took to social media saying it was completed.
Ukrainian authorities said 270 soldiers and 120 civilians were included in Friday's exchange.
Zelenskyy's office said earlier this month that more than 8,000 Ukrainian soldiers are estimated to have been captured by Russia since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. According to Ukraine's human rights ombudsman, more than 16,000 Ukrainian civilians are also in Russian captivity.
One of those civilians is Volodymyr Mykolayenko, the former mayor of the southern city of Kherson. His niece Hanna Korsun-Samchuk told NPR that Russian forces took him away after occupying the city for several months in 2022.
"I've been trying to raise the issue of civilian prisoners because there's no easy procedure for exchanging them," she said on Monday in an interview in Kherson.
Dozens of Ukrainian families waited for hours in a leafy courtyard for the liberated prisoners of war, hoping their loved ones would be among them. They held banners, flags and posters emblazoned with images of their loved ones, all soldiers.
Katya Kobel, who is from the northern city of Chernihiv, wept as she spoke about her husband, Hryhori, who has been in Russian captivity since December 2023. She says she found 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 have captured your man,' " she said.
Natalia Apetyk is hoping her 23-year-old son, Yelizar, will finally come home. He has been in Russian captivity since 2022, when he was captured while defending eastern Ukraine from a Russian incursion.
"Today it is exactly three years since his last call, and tomorrow it will be three years since he disappeared," she said.
Eighteen-year-old Milena Moroz is holding a photograph of her father, Yevhen, who was taken prisoner in February of this year in eastern Ukraine. She says she didn't see her father as much as she would have liked, since her parents are divorced.
She is waiting to tell him something important, something she wished she had told him more often: "I love you, Dad."
NPR's Hanna Palamarenko contributed to this report from Kyiv.
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