Ukraine and Russia completed a two-day prisoner of war exchange on Friday, returning 300 service personnel from each side to conclude a 500-for-500 swap agreed during the third round of US-brokered peace talks in Geneva in February.
The swap is the largest single exchange since the Istanbul negotiations last summer and one whose execution, coming in the same week the US-Israel war against Iran displaced the Ukraine conflict from the centre of Washington’s diplomatic attention, was described by Ukrainian officials as proof that Kyiv’s repatriation effort would continue regardless of geopolitical turbulence.
Russian Kremlin adviser and chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky confirmed the two-day structure of the exchange on Telegram: “Within the framework of the agreements reached in Geneva, a prisoner swap with Ukraine will take place on March 5 and 6, 500 for 500.” The Russian Defence Ministry described the broader exchange as the outcome of a “complex negotiation process” facilitated by the United Arab Emirates and the United States.
The youngest soldier returned in the exchange is 27 years old, the oldest 59. Many of those released were in a difficult psychological condition, and some were critically underweight, Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted a video on Telegram showing dozens of men exiting large white buses, smiling, waving, and thanking the Ukrainian border guards who greeted them.
“They defended Ukraine in various sectors, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Mariupol,” he wrote. “Most of them had been in captivity for more than a year, some since 2022.” Two Ukrainian civilians were also returned on Friday. One returning serviceman was filmed speaking to his phone on loudspeaker: “I am alive and healthy. It is all good. I do not have teeth.”
The two-day exchange brought the total number of prisoners exchanged between the two countries since February 2022 to 5,955, with the UAE involved in 20 separate negotiations since the full-scale invasion began.
The UAE Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement thanking Russia and Ukraine for their cooperation and reaffirmed Abu Dhabi’s support for all efforts aimed at reaching a comprehensive political settlement. Last month, Abu Dhabi hosted talks between Russia, Ukraine, and the United States, at which Washington and Moscow agreed to re-establish military dialogue after lines of communication had been suspended since 2021.
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The February 5 exchange, the first in nearly four months at the time, with Zelenskyy having said Moscow had blocked swaps throughout the preceding period, returned 157 Ukrainian POWs following the Abu Dhabi talks, which were the first direct negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow since 2022. Though no political breakthrough was reached in Abu Dhabi, both sides agreed to the phased Geneva-brokered exchange completed this week.
The completion of the swap did not alter the fundamentally deadlocked diplomatic landscape. The two sides have periodically traded prisoners and returned the bodies of dead soldiers even during periods with no progress toward a peace agreement to end the four-year war. A third round of talks in Geneva last month produced the exchange agreement but no substantive movement on the underlying political and territorial questions dividing Kyiv and Moscow. Ukraine had hoped for a new round of talks at the start of March, but those discussions were postponed after the US and Israel launched their military campaign against Iran on February 28, prompting Iran to fire missiles toward Israel and Gulf states hosting US military facilities and pulling Washington’s full diplomatic attention into the Middle East crisis. Zelenskyy said earlier this week that Kyiv was waiting for the United States to set a new date for the next round.
Russia’s response to the Iran war has been notably muted. President Vladimir Putin called the US and Israeli strikes “cynical” but issued neither threats, red lines, nor commitments to assist Tehran — a posture that analysts described as reflecting Moscow’s calculation that the conflict, however it resolves, leaves Russia’s strategic position largely unchanged and its primary attention on Ukraine undiverted.
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Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine has returned more than 7,000 Ukrainians from captivity, Zelenskyy said in October 2025. The Interior Ministry said in September 2025 that 2,577 Ukrainian soldiers had been confirmed to be held in Russian captivity based on open-source intelligence analysis — a figure that, if accurate, indicates the exchange programme has returned a majority of confirmed captives but that a significant number remain unaccounted for. Zelenskyy thanked US and UAE mediators in his Friday post, and credited frontline Ukrainian forces with maintaining the conditions that made swaps possible. “I am grateful to all our soldiers who are at the front ensuring the replenishment of the exchange fund for Ukraine. The return of our people home is the result of the strength of the Ukrainian defenders,” he said.
No date has been announced for a fourth round of peace talks.