Ukraine updates: 10 held by Russia, Belarus return to Kyiv
June 29, 2024
Several Ukrainians freed from Russian detention, aided by Vatican
Ten Ukrainians, including a politician and two priests, who were held captive by Russia and Belarus have returned home, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.
He thanked the Vatican for its mediation in the release of the civilians.
Some of those released have been in prison since 2017, Zelenskyy said, arrested in Russian-controlled parts of eastern Ukraine that at the time were run by Moscow-backed separatists.
One of the freed captives was Nariman Dzhelyal, a leader of the Crimean Tatars, who was taken a year before Moscow’s forces invaded. He was detained from where he lived in Crimea, despite the peninsula being illegally annexed by Russia a few years earlier.
Five of those liberated had been held in ex-Soviet Belarus, Moscow’s closest ally, which allowed the Kremlin to use its territory to help launch the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Russia and Ukraine have exchanged hundreds of prisoners throughout the nearly two-and-a-half-year conflict, typically in one-for-one swaps. But the release of civilian prisoners is rarer.
Some 3,310 Ukrainians have already been released from Russian captivity, according to Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War. But many thousands, both civilians and military personnel, remain imprisoned.
mm/kb (AFP, AP, dpa, Reuters)
