KYIV (Reuters) – Ukraine’s presidency announced on Sunday that 130 Ukrainian prisoners had been released in a new exchange with Russia over the Orthodox Easter.
Kyiv did not specify how many Russian POWs were included in the exchange.
The leader of the Russian paramilitary Wagner militia, Yevgeny Prigojine, said for his part that a hundred Ukrainian prisoners had been returned by his group, which has been working since last summer to reconquer the small town of Bakhmout, in the eastern Ukraine, which recently staged the filmed beheading of a Ukrainian soldier.
Ukrainian presidential chief of staff Andriy Yermak told the Telegram app that the Easter exchange, the 14th of its kind since the start of the war 14 months ago, took place “in several stages in course of the last days”.
Kyiv and Moscow had already announced last Monday that they had exchanged around a hundred detainees on each side. Ukraine also said on Friday it had recovered the bodies of 82 soldiers who fell on land now controlled by Russian forces.
(Written by Pavel Polityuk, French version Tangi Salaün)
