The families had been warned, as with each exchange of prisoners of war with Russia: “You probably won’t recognize your husband or your son. Hide your surprise. Or at least try. » Often injured, victims of systematic torture, having lost up to half their weight, they are shadows that return to them after months of captivity. On January 3, 230 Ukrainians were repatriated for 248 Russians, the largest exchange, in terms of numbers, since the beginning of the invasion.
“Each negotiation is unique, secret. All the levers are used and I can just tell you that it is never anything like a “gentleman agreement” [accord informel]. But this time the situation was really extreme,” explains Petro Yatsenko, spokesperson for the Ukrainian coordination for the treatment of prisoners of war. While exchanges took place every month on average, the process had been blocked since August 7, 2023, a delay so long that kyiv had to build a second military detention center due to lack of rotation.
The failure of the Ukrainian counter-offensive this summer undoubtedly did not help the country to speed up negotiations. “Talks are completely different when you lose”, bluntly says Iryna Bogdanova, an exchange manager at the Ukrainian general staff. In this hybrid war, manipulation and dirty tricks are also part of the game.
According to kyiv, Moscow dragged out negotiations to try to fracture Ukrainian society, playing on the exasperation of prisoners’ families. For months, they had been receiving phone calls from their loved ones, detained in Russia, all saying the same message, visibly under duress: “Go demonstrate everywhere against the authorities, they are the ones who refuse to help us. »
File kept secret
In Moscow, on the other hand, there is no hurry. The overwhelming majority of its captured soldiers today are those it sends to die on the front line: common law convicts recruited against the promise of a pardon, or fathers of families in debt, lured by a soldier’s salary. “For the Kremlin, these people don’t count,” continues Petro Yatsenko, from coordination. He likes to remember the “Viktor Medvedchuk case”, A Pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarch, close to President Vladimir Putin, arrested for high treason in April 2022 and exchanged for 151 Ukrainian soldiers alone, on September 22, 2022.
There are Chechen fighters too: “The jackpot when you catch one because we know that Grozny buys Ukrainian prisoners from Moscow to exchange its own as quickly as possible,” continues Petro Yatsenko. On the other hand, a Russian commander, who was taken away with ten of his men during the liberation of Kherson in November 2022, was removed from the exchange list by Moscow: when he is caught, a officer becomes a “ traitor”, as in the days of the Soviet Union.
You have 70% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.