Ukraine and Russia exchange more prisoners of war under Istanbul deal
Ukraine and Russia carried out another exchange of prisoners of war on Thursday, based on the Istanbul deal of 2 June.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that the latest swap focused on "severely wounded and seriously ill warriors."
Ukraine's Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of the POW issued a statement, saying "this is part of a major exchange that continues in phases."
"These soldiers require urgent medical care and will receive full assistance, including psychological rehabilitation and financial compensation for their time in captivity," the coordination HQ said.
Kyiv is not revealing how many Ukrainian defenders have been exchanged at each stage. Ukrainian authorities are expected to release this information once the exchange is completed.
Kyiv announced that many of the severely injured soldiers who had returned home on Thursday had served in combat operations across Donetsk, Luhansk, Kharkiv, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions.
Some of the returned soldiers have been considered "missing" while many have been in Russian captivity for over three years.
Kyiv and Moscow have been carrying out prisoner-of-war swaps for the last couple of days. During the Istanbul talks, the sides have agreed to exchange young soldiers under 25 and the severely injured and sick POWs.
They have also agreed to repatriate the bodies of the soldiers.
On Wednesday, Ukraine said it brought back the bodies of 1,212 fallen defenders. The repatriation was carried out through a coordinated effort involving the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), the Armed Forces, the Interior Ministry, the Ombudsman's Office, the State Emergency Service, and other national security and defence institutions.
The International Committee of the Red Cross also supported the operation.
Officials emphasised that investigative and forensic teams from the Interior Ministry and the Health Ministry are working to identify the bodies in the shortest possible time.
Vladimir Medinsky, aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin and the head of the Russian delegation at the Istanbul talks, claimed that Ukraine released the remains of 27 Russian service members.
The Ukrainian side did not disclose how many Russian bodies were handed over to Moscow.
After the meeting in Turkey on 2 June, Medinsky said that Russia would transfer 6,000 bodies of Ukrainian soldiers and officers.
A viral video which shows three different chatbots speaking in their own "secret language" has amassed hundreds of thousands of views across various social media platforms.
The clip shows three chatbots engaging in a phone call in English, in which they discuss "an employee's badge number".
When the machines realise that they are all speaking to other bots, they ask each other whether they should switch to "Gibberlink", prompting them to start emitting high-pitched noises, in what appears to be something out of a science-fiction film.
Gibberlink — a term which combines "gibberish" and "link" — is real. While use of the technology is limited, it enables AI engines to communicate in their own language.
EuroVerify asked Anton Pidkuiko, who co-founded Gibberlink, to review a number of online clips.
"Many of the videos are imitating an existing technology — they show phones which aren't really communicating and there is no signal between them, instead the sounds have been edited in and visuals have been taken from ChatGPT."
Fake online videos purporting to show Gibberlink software have begun to emerge after the technology was created in February by Pidkuiko and fellow AI engineer Boris Starkov, during a 24-hour tech hackathon held in London.
The pair combined ggwave — an existing open-source technology that enables data exchange through sound — with artificial intelligence.
So, although AI can communicate in its own language, it is not "secret", as it is based on open-source data and is coded by humans.
For Pidkuiko, the technology is comparable to QR codes. "Every supermarket item has a bar code which makes the shopping experience much more efficient."
"Gibberlink is essentially this barcode — or think of it as a QR code — but over sound. Humans can look at QR code and just see black and white pieces. But QR codes don't scare people."
While the use of Gibberlink technology is very limited at present, its creators believe it will become more mainstream, "as it stands, AI is able to make and receive phone calls," Pidkuiko said.
"With time, we will see an increase in the number of these robot calls — and essentially more and more we will see that one AI is exchanging."
Although this technology presents the risk of stripping humans of meaningful interactions, as well as replacing a further swath of unnecessary jobs, for Pidkuiko Gibberlink, it would be a means of maximising efficiency.
"If you manage a restaurant and have a phone number that people call to book tables, you will sometimes receive calls in different languages," stated Pidkuiko.
"However, if it's a robot that can speak every language and it is always available, the line is never blocked and you will have no language issues."
"Another way the technology could be used, is if you want to book a restaurant, but don't want to ring 10 different places to ask if they have space, you can get AI to make the call and he restaurant can get AI to receive it. If they can communicate more quickly in their own language, it makes sense", concluded Pidkuiko.
However, fears around what could happen if humans become unable to interpret AI communications are real, and in January the release of AI software DeepSeek R1 raised alarm.
Researchers who had been working on the technology revealed they incentivised the software to find the right answers, regardless of whether its reasoning was comprehensible to humans.
However, this led the AI to begin spontaneously switching from English to Chinese to achieve a result. When researchers forced the technology to stick to one language — to ensure that users could follow its processes — its capacity to find answers was hindered.
This incident led industry experts to worry that incentivising AI to find the correct answers, without ensuring its processes can be untangled by humans, could lead AI to develop languages that cannot be understood.
In 2017, Facebook abandoned an experiment after two AI programmes began conversing in a language which only they understood.
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