No joyful reunions for prisoners of war brought back to Ukraine

Times

2 days ago

They came in ambulances, not coaches. The first to emerge were pushed in wheelchairs up the ramp to the hospital door; the next walked slowly up on their own, their sunken eyes passing over the crowds thronging below.
These Ukrainian prisoners of war, the wounded, the sick and the disabled, were the latest to be released in a series of prisoner swaps with Russia, the only concrete measure agreed at negotiations overseen by the Americans that began in Istanbul last month.
There were no joyful reunions. All those swapped for their Russian counterparts were immediately ushered into the hospital by waiting medical staff. President Zelensky welcomed them home as heroes but said 'all require medical treatment' being 'severely wounded and seriously ill'.
A day earlier, Russia and Ukraine exchanged the bodies of 1,200 each of their fallen after an ugly war of words over who was holding up proceedings. After a prisoner exchange fell through last week, Russia drove refrigerated lorries to the border and flung open the doors to show piled up body bags containing dead Ukrainian soldiers — a move denounced by Zelensky as 'a dirty political and propaganda game'.
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The exchanges, which restarted this week with the youngest prisoners of war from both sides, have become magnets of desperate hope and grief for the families of the missing. Outside the hospital mothers, fathers, sisters, wives, girlfriends and children jostled to hold up photographs of their loved ones, calling out names, battalions and where the missing were last seen.
Suddenly there was a scream from the crowd. 'Denys, Denys!' a young woman shouted, holding her toddler daughter. It was the first she had learnt that her husband, missing in action for two years, was alive. Medical staff caught her as she collapsed and was put into a wheelchair. She was the only family member allowed inside as the soldiers underwent examination and debriefing before their transfer to ­rehabilitation.
The walking wounded, who arrived later by bus, were less willing to be rushed inside. Shaven-headed, they stood on the ramp outside the hospital door, blinking in the sunlight as their eyes raked over the photographs of their missing comrades held aloft by the crowds. One sadly shook his head as he looked at face after face. Another held out his hands and studied each photograph closely. 'Yes,' he said. 'This one I know.'
At the sight of a returned prisoner at a fifth floor window, the crowd surged, shouting out for information. From the window, he shouted the phone number of his former cellmate's mother which he had memorised to let her know he was still alive. 'He is from Azov,' he shouted. 'He was in my cell.'
Russia provides no official information on prisoners of war, neither to Ukraine nor to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is tasked under the Geneva Convention with facilitating communications between PoWs and their families.
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'These men are not just in a very bad condition, they have been held incommunicado for up to three years,' said Petro Yatsenko, spokesman for Ukraine's Co-ordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War. 'They do not know anything that has happened in the war. They don't know if Ukraine is completely broken.'
On their medical treatment in captivity, he cited one prisoner released earlier this week, who told a Russian military doctor he was experiencing excruciating pain in his foot. 'The doctor said: 'Show me where' and he showed him and the doctor beat him right in that place,' he said. 'The doctor did that.'
The first time many of those released had seen any news of the war it was Russian state media, screened to them in anticipation of their release.