Twenty Ukrainians are returning home from Russian captivity through a prisoner exchange with Russian proxies taking place on April 16, the Office of President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a statement.
The first part of the exchange was held near the Mayorsk checkpoint, over 670 kilometres east of Kyiv. The second part is set to take place at an unspecified location in Luhansk Oblast, most likely near the town of Stanytsya Luhanska.
The April 16 prisoner swap is the third exchange overseen by Zelensky. Altogether, 135 Ukrainians have returned home since the first such exchange of his presidency was held in September.
According to the president’s office, Ukraine will continue to bring Ukrainians home as part of the “all for all” exchange agreement signed between Russia and Ukraine during the latest meeting of the Normandy Format peace negotiations, which was held in Paris on Dec. 9. Format members Germany and France also took part in the meeting.
On March 15, Zelensky said that Ukraine had submitted a list of over 200 people it wants released to the Trilateral Contact Group in Minsk, a negotiation platform for issues related to the war in the Donbas that includes representatives of Ukraine, Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
Of those people, 115 are held in Russia and occupied Crimea. The rest are prisoners in Russian-occupied Donbas.
Bringing them home
After winning the 2019 presidential election in April, Zelensky made bringing home Ukrainians held in Russian captivity his number one priority.
Russia started its war against Ukraine in 2014, seizing Crimea and invading the eastern Donbas. Since then, the conflict has killed over 13,000 Ukrainians.
“Let me do my job. I promised the people of Ukraine that we will bring back the prisoners, bring back the sailors, we will end the war,” Zelensky said on Aug. 23, referring to 24 Ukrainian sailors held by Russia at that time. Three prisoner exchanges have taken place since then.
On Sept. 7, Ukraine and Russia swapped 35 people each, the first mass release of Ukrainians from Russian prisons since the beginning of the war.
The freed prisoners included filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who was imprisoned in 2014 in occupied Crimea and became the best-known Ukrainian prisoner in Russia. Ukraine also returned the 24 sailors, who were captured by Russia in the Kerch Strait, near Crimea, in November 2018.
In return, Ukraine released Volodymyr Tsemakh, a key suspect in the crash of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which was shot down by Russia on July 17, 2014. All 298 people on board, mainly Dutch citizens, were killed.
The MH17 trial began in the Hague on March 9.
On Dec. 29, a second exchange took place between Ukraine and Russian-led proxies. It was the first such exchange since December 2017. Seventy-six Ukrainians returned home from captivity in the Russian-occupied Donbas, and Ukraine released 124 people in return, including individuals accused of terrorism and mass murder.
The Zelensky administration’s most controversial move was to release five former members of the now-disbanded Berkut riot police. They were accused of taking part in the killings of roughly 100 protesters on Feb. 18-20, 2014 during the EuroMaidan Revolution.
Their release ensured that they would not be brought to justice for their crimes.
