THE Ukraine announced today that it had exchanged 144 troops with Russia, including 95 “Azofstal defenders” in Mariupolin southeastern Ukraine, who had defended this port city that had been besieged by the Russian army for weeks before finally falling into its hands.
“This is the largest exchange (with Moscow) since the Russian invasion began,” the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Central Intelligence Agency told Telegram, without giving further details on the location or date of the operation.
The Ukrainian army and the Russian side exchanged a total of almost 300 prisonersaccording to their announcements.
“Among them are 43 soldiers of the Azov Battalion,” a unit that has been in the Ukrainian army for years but that Moscow describes as “Nazi,” the Ukrainian intelligence service added.
They exchanged with 52 other soldiers who were also inside Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol at the time of the Russian attack.
“Most” of the detainees exchanged “are seriously injured”, “from bullets or fragments of shells”, but also suffer from “burns, fractures”, the Ukrainian intelligence service said.
The last Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol, fortified at the huge Azovstal steel plant in the Sea of ​​Azov, surrendered to Russian forces between May 16th and 20th, after three months of heavy fighting.
On 28 May, the French President Emanuel Macron and the German Chancellor Olaf Solts They demanded that their Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin release 2,500 Ukrainian fighters inside the steel plant.
Pro-Russian separatist leader Denis Pushilin confirmed the exchange, saying 144 “soldiers of the Donetsk People’s Republic and Russia have returned home” for their part.
The released Ukrainian detainees are “in critical condition, with serious injuries,” he told the Telegram.
“Everyone is receiving medical and psychological care,” said the Ukrainian intelligence service, which announced the release of 17 detainees on Tuesday in another exchange with Russia.
The Ukrainian Prime Minister Dennis Smigal commented on the exchange in the Telegram, describing the work of releasing the prisoners as “complicated”.
Kyiv and Moscow have repeatedly exchanged prisoners since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24.
The last one, officially announced before these two exchanges, took place in early May and involved 41 Ukrainians.
The two countries also exchanged the bodies of soldiers in mid-June, an exchange that allowed Ukraine to receive the bodies of 64 Azofstal defenders in Mariupol.
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