Russia and Ukraine said they had exchanged dozens of prisoners on Monday, many of them women, the latest sign that the countries are willing to negotiate to free their citizens even as the war escalates.
Andriy Yermak, the head of the Ukrainian president’s office, said that 108 women who had been prisoners of war had been freed from Russia.
“Another large-scale POWs swap was carried out today,” he wrote on Twitter. “Extremely emotional and really special,” he added. He said that those freed included 11 officers and 85 privates and noncommissioned officers.
“Now all the ladies will undergo a medical examination and rehabilitation. They will hug their relatives, their children,” he wrote on Twitter. “They will recover.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly address that 12 of the released prisoners were civilians. “We do not forget about any of our people — we have to return them all,” he said.
Mr. Zelensky urged his country’s soldiers to remember the value of prisoners. “The more Russian prisoners we have, the sooner we will be able to free our heroes,” he said. “Every Ukrainian warrior, every frontline commander should remember this.”
Russia’s defense ministry confirmed the prisoner swap, saying that 110 Russian citizens had been freed by the Ukrainian authorities and were returning to Moscow via military transport. Among the prisoners, it said, were 72 Russian sailors from civilian ships who had been held by the Ukrainian authorities since February.
It said that two Ukrainian women voluntarily refused to return to Ukraine, preferring to stay in the Russian Federation, a claim that was not confirmed by Ukraine.
Late last month, Andriy Yusov, who represents the intelligence department in Ukraine’s defense ministry, said that, as of then, about 800 prisoners of war had been returned to Ukraine in roughly 20 exchanges since Russia’s invasion began in February. His statement to journalists gave no details of the mechanism for the swaps and did not say how many Russians were exchanged.
This month, United Nations investigators in Ukraine said they were receiving accounts of Russian forces torturing civilian and military prisoners — sometimes to the point of death. At the same time, they said, people were disappearing frequently in areas controlled by Russia and its proxies.
