More than 100 Ukrainian prisoners of war will be able to return to their families after an exchange of captured members of the Russian and Ukrainian armed forces.
The prisoner swap on Saturday, mediated by the United Arab Emirates, involved 206 military personnel from both countries.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said that of the 103 Ukrainian “warriors” who were released, 82 were soldiers and privates and 21 were officers, including police officers and border guards.
Later, he said that his forces’ incursion into Kursk had helped bring about the prisoner exchange. In his nightly video address Zelenskiy thanked his forces for their work on the prisoner exchanges, and added: “In particular, our operation in the Kursk region gave a necessary boost.”
Photographers captured the moment that the smiling and emotional Ukrainians, wrapped in their country’s flag, embraced their fellow soldiers after being swapped at an unknown location in Ukraine.
They looked pale and thin, and all of the men released had shaved heads. One kneeled on the ground, his national flag draped around his shoulders, and stared down at his homeland as he made an emotional phone call.
In return for their freedom, Ukraine has handed over 103 Russian military personnel taken prisoner in the Kursk border region when Ukrainian forces launched a surprise incursion in August.
The Russian defence ministry said in a statement that all these Russians were now in Belarus, “where they are being provided with the necessary psychological and medical assistance, as well as an opportunity to contact their relatives”.
It is the second such swap since Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk region, and occurred after mediated negotiations between the two countries.
UAE officials said that the number of captives exchanged through its mediation efforts now stood at 1,994.
On Saturday, Ukraine made a new call on the west to allow it to strike deeper into Russia, after a meeting on Friday between Joe Biden and Keir Starmer failed to produce a visible shift in British and US policies on the use of long-range weapons.
Zelenskiy has been pushing for months to use British Storm Shadow missiles, which can strike targets at least 190 miles (300km) away, to bomb airbases, missile sites and other military targets inside Russia.
So far, the US has only allowed Kyiv to use American-provided weapons to strike within a limited area inside Russia’s border with Ukraine.
“Russian terror begins at weapons depots, airfields and military bases inside the Russian Federation,” the Ukrainian presidential adviser Andriy Yermak said on Saturday.
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“Permission to strike deep into Russia will speed up the solution.”
On Thursday, Vladimir Putin warned western leaders that allowing Ukraine to use western-made long-range missiles would amount to Nato being at war with Russia.
At Friday’s foreign policy summit with Starmer at the White House, Biden said he did not accept that and then told reporters: “I do not think much about Vladimir Putin.”
On Saturday, a senior Nato military official said Ukraine would have a good reason to strike deeper into Russia using western weapons.
Adm Rob Bauer said the law on armed conflict gave a nation the right to defend itself and that did not stop at its border.
He said: “In military terms, you do (those attacks) because you want to weaken the enemy that attacks you in order to not only fight the arrows that come your way, but also attack the archer.
“So, militarily, there is a good reason to do that; to weaken the enemy, to weaken its logistics lines, fuel, ammunition that comes to the front.”