Ukraine regained 270 people in a prisoner exchange with Russia on Friday, 23 October, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced. Among those freed are five soldiers who had been presumed dead after the attack on the Olenivka prison in 2022.
Zelensky shared the news in a post on X, which we quote below.
According to the president, National Guard soldiers are returning home, including Azov fighters, as well as border guards, Territorial Defence soldiers, navy, ground forces, airborne troops and State Special Communications Service personnel, along with civilians. Most of them had been in captivity since 2022. As Ukrinform reports, quoting Zelensky, many were unlawfully sentenced in Russia.
Defenders of Mariupol and five „resurrected” soldiers
Zelensky said the vast majority of those freed are defenders of Mariupol. Soldiers who fought in the Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Kyiv, Mykolaiv and Chernihiv directions are also coming home.
Five people had previously been declared killed in the attack on the Olenivka detention facility in July 2022. The Kyiv Independent recalls that during that attack, thermobaric ammunition exploded in a barrack holding Ukrainian prisoners of war; Kyiv blames Russia for this. Zelensky wrote that Ukraine remembers every one of them and „continues the search for all of them”.
Civilians and the other side of the exchange
Reports differ on the number of civilians. Zelensky spoke of nine, while according to the Kyiv Independent, Ukraine’s Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, wrote on Facebook about seven civilians brought back from Russia. He added that another seven civilians travelled to Russia as part of family reunification facilitated by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
The Kyiv Independent reports that Russia regained 270 of its prisoners in the exchange. It is the first exchange in about two months. Ukrinform recalls that on 24 August, ten soldiers returned to Ukraine in a special stage of the exchange via Belarus, and earlier, on 19 August, 103 soldiers were freed. At the time of publication, we had not seen an official Russian statement describing how the exchange was carried out.
Zelensky thanked everyone involved in preparing the exchange and the soldiers at the front who, as he put it, „replenish the exchange fund”, meaning they take Russian soldiers prisoner.
What it means
For readers in Poland, this is first and foremost a humanitarian and political story: prisoner exchanges remain the only functioning channel of contact between Kyiv and Moscow on prisoners, despite the ongoing war. It does not change the situation at the front and does not directly concern Polish citizens. We have covered similar exchanges involving Belarus when we reported on the release of Andrzej Poczobut in a prisoner swap.
