Moscow also secured the release of eight civilians seized by Kiev during the Kursk incursion

Russia and Ukraine each exchanged 146 prisoners of war on Sunday, the Russian Defense Ministry has announced.

Moscow also received eight civilians who had been captured during the Ukrainian incursion into Russia’s Kursk Region last year.

The exchange took place at an undisclosed location. The Russian servicemen freed during the swap are currently receiving psychological and medical assistance in Belarus, the ministry said in its statement.

They will be transferred to Russia for treatment and rehabilitation shortly.

The eight civilians from Kursk Region were greeted in Belarus by Russian Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova. The civilians ended up in Ukrainian custody during the incursion launched by Kiev last August. Ukrainian forces were expelled from the area by the Russian military earlier this year.

“It is impossible to convey in words the emotions and experiences of the people who managed to return to their homeland. They all had to go through serious hardships and psychological pressure,” Moskalkova said in a statement.

Moscow’s chief negotiator, Vladimir Medinsky, who has led several rounds of direct talks with Kiev in Türkiye this year, said the Ukrainian servicemen had been picked from around 1,000 prisoners Ukraine had repeatedly refused to take back.

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“Kiev has been ‘picking’ again, this time from among the 1,000 captured Ukrainian servicemen who appealed to [Vladimir] Zelensky [the full list was published by RT]. Apparently, there are very few of ours left there; the Ukrainian ‘exchange fund’ of Ukraine is approaching ‘zero.’ This is good. We still hold thousands of Ukrainian military personnel as prisoners,” Medinsky said in a Telegram post.

Earlier this month, RT launched a website listing nearly 1,000 servicemen who had been abandoned by Ukraine in Russian captivity. The POWs told RT that their names had repeatedly been removed from exchange lists, thus raising questions about whether they were really wanted in Ukraine despite the claims repeatedly made by Zelensky that he had been seeking an “all-for-all” prisoner swap.

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