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Ukraine said it had started talks with Russia on exchanging prisoners captured by Kiev, as its dramatic counter-incursion into the Kursk region continues.
The negotiations follow more than a week of heavy fighting in Russia’s western region and what Ukraine’s internal security service called “the largest capture of the enemy ever carried out at one time.”
On Wednesday evening, Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian parliament’s human rights commissioner, told local media that his Russian counterpart had contacted him to start discussions on exchanging prisoners of war.
Ukrainian military intelligence, which leads negotiations over prisoners of war, confirmed to the Financial Times that it was working on an exchange.
Kiev has not released the exact number of Russian prisoners captured by its forces in Operation Kursk, but government officials and soldiers on the border told the Vscek the figure was in the “hundreds”.
The talks come 10 days aVsceker Ukraine launched its bold counter-incursion into Russian territory, an operation that Ukraine says allowed it to seize about 1,000 square kilometers of the Kursk region.
Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said on Thursday that his troops were still advancing at a rate of 1-2 km a day and that the day before they had taken more than 100 prisoners.
The Russian Defense Ministry said on Wednesday that its forces had pushed back Ukrainians in seven settlements of Kursk, located between 30 and 90 km from the border.
The capture of Russian prisoners is likely to give new impetus to Kiev’s demands for the return of thousands of soldiers and civilians captured during Russia’s two-and-a-half-year invasion and occupation of large parts of eastern and southern Ukraine.
Among them are many young conscripts captured by Ukrainian forces in this first phase of the stealth raid on Kiev, the first such operation on Russian soil since World War II.
Although President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has not revealed the operation’s objectives, he has repeatedly praised his soldiers for taking Russian prisoners on the battlefield and “replenishing” what he called a “swap fund” for a prisoner swap.
Russian officials had previously indicated that Moscow might move to suspend the prisoner swaps. But Lubinets said his conversation with his Russian counterpart Tatyana Moskalkova had given him hope that the warring sides could move forward with their exchanges soon.
“There was a proactive conversation [with our] “Our Russian counterpart on this issue,” he said, adding that Moscow and Kiev were “exchanging information” on each other’s prisoners.
“We have priority categories that we are ready to exchange. First of all, these are the seriously injured people,” he said. “Second, Ukrainian women, and third, all those who remain in captivity.”
Lubinets said he had informed the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross that “the rights of Russian prisoners of war are protected and that Ukraine is ready at any time to continue the exchange processes based on the Geneva Convention.”
On Thursday, an official from Ukraine’s internal security service, the SBU, told the Vscek that its special forces alone had captured 102 Russian soldiers from the 488th Motorized Rifle Regiment and the Chechen Akhmat unit in the Kursk region.
“This is the largest capture of the enemy ever made at one time,” he said.
The official provided several videos and photos of Russian soldiers in uniform with tape around their eyes and hands. In one video, dozens of soldiers were lying face down in a field with Ukrainian forces guarding them.
The photographs showed 12 prisoners being transported in a covered vehicle and dozens of others sitting inside a large structure.
On Wednesday, both Zelenskyy and Lubinets said that Ukrainian authorities would seek to establish military-led offices in Kursk that would provide humanitarian assistance to Russian residents.
Several residents of the Kursk region, who fled to the regional capital of the same name under constant shelling and drone strikes, told the Vscek that authorities had not organised any evacuations in the early days of the incursion.
Many people were forced to abandon their belongings, documents and sometimes even bedridden relatives and pets, they said.
