Sawt Falasteen - Ukraine, Russia begin biggest prisoner swap of war

Both sides received 390 people in this first stage. They are expected to exchange 1,000 each in total under an agreement reached at direct talks in Istanbul last week.

The process will last three days, Kyiv said.

The two enemies have held regular exchanges since Russia launched its 2022 offensive -- but none have been on this scale.

Images released by Kyiv showed Ukrainian soldiers smiling and embracing after being released, some of them draped in bright Ukrainian flags.

"The first stage of the '1,000-for-1,000' exchange agreement has been carried out," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a post on X.

"Today -- 390 people. On Saturday and Sunday, we expect the exchange to continue."

Russia said it had received 270 Russian troops and 120 civilians, including some from parts of its Kursk region captured and held by Kyiv for months.

The two sides have not yet revealed the identities of those exchanged.

US President Donald Trump earlier congratulated the two countries for the swap.

"This could lead to something big???" he wrote in a post on Truth Social.

Trump's efforts to broker a ceasefire in Europe's biggest conflict since World War II have thus far been unsuccessful, despite his pledge to rapidly end the fighting.

- Anxious wait for news -

Several Ukrainians told AFP they were anxiously waiting to see if their relatives were included in the swap.

"We have been looking for our son for two years," said Liudmyla Parkhomenko, a mother of a Ukrainian soldier who went missing during combat in the city of Bakhmut.

"Today I would like the Lord to send us good news... We feel in our hearts that he's alive," she said.

Anastasia Ruda, 28, said she hoped her brother would return.

"It's been eight months of silence, we don't even know whether he is in captivity or not, we hope that maybe the guys will help us today," she said.

After 39 months of fighting, thousands of POWs are held in both countries.

Russia is believed to have the larger share, with the number of Ukrainian captives held by Moscow estimated to be between 8,000 and 10,000.

Kyiv and Moscow have both accused each other of violating the Geneva Convention on the treatment of POWs. The UN said prisoners on both sides had been "subjected to torture and ill-treatment".

Shortly before the exchange, Kyiv released a statement accusing the Russian army of having executed around 270 Ukrainian POWs since its invasion.

Russia regularly violates international norms by putting POWs on trial, and allegations of torture are widespread and several Ukrainian captives confirmed to have died in custody.

Moscow's forces are also believed to have taken an unknown number of Ukrainian civilians into Russia in three years of seizing Ukrainian towns and cities.

- Return of people considered dead -

Around 60,000 Ukrainians have been declared missing, 10,000 of whom were believed to be in captivity, Kyiv's Commissioner for Missing Persons, Artur Dobroserdov, told Ukrainian media last month.

With Kyiv not knowing the fate of thousands, each exchange brings surprises, a senior official told AFP.

"Almost every exchange includes people no one had knowledge about," he said.

"Sometimes they return people who were on the lists of missing persons or were considered dead."

A sizeable number of Ukrainian troops held in Russia were taken captive during the 2022 siege of Mariupol.

Aside from the thousands held since Moscow's invasion in 2022, Russia has also held some Ukrainians since its annexation of Crimea in 2014.

The number of Russian POWs in Ukraine is believed to be considerably smaller.

Zelensky has throughout the war encouraged the taking of Russian troops as prisoners to fill up what he calls Kyiv's "exchange fund" for future swaps.

Until the Turkey talks last Friday, the only communication channels open between the warring neighbours in three years were on exchanges of prisoners and soldiers' bodies as well as on the return of children taken into Russia during Moscow's invasion.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Friday cast doubt on the Vatican as a potential venue for peace talks.

K.Hassan--SF-PST