BBCA Ukrainian official instructed the BBC he hopes a New Year prisoner swap with Russia will occur “any day now”, though offers may fall by on the final minute.
Petro Yatsenko, of the Ukrainian headquarters for the therapy of prisoners of warfare, mentioned that negotiations with Moscow on the prisoner trade had develop into tougher in current months as Russian forces started making important progress on the entrance strains.
There have been solely 10 exchanges in 2024, the bottom quantity for the reason that full-scale invasion started. Ukraine doesn’t publish the variety of prisoners of warfare held by Russia, however the whole is believed to be greater than 8,000.
Russia has made notable positive factors on the battlefield this 12 months, elevating fears that the variety of captured Ukrainians is rising.
One of these introduced dwelling within the newest trade, in September 2024, is Ukrainian Marine Andriy Turas. In an condominium within the Ukrainian metropolis of Lviv, Andriy and his spouse Lena inform me the extraordinary story of their ordeal. Both had been captured whereas defending the town of Mariupol in 2022.
“They lectured us about how Ukraine by no means existed,” Lena, a fight medic, says of her Russian captors. “They tried to exterminate our Ukrainian identification in our heads.”
Lena was launched after two weeks of captivity. But the psychological scars of what he skilled in a Russian jail facility stay. “We continually heard screaming, we knew the boys (in our unit) had been being tortured,” he says.
“They beat us mercilessly, with fists, sticks, hammers, something they might discover,” says Andriy. “They stripped us bare within the chilly and compelled us to crawl on the asphalt. Our legs had been torn and we had been left terrified and frozen.”
“The meals was horrible: bitter cabbage and rotten fish heads. It’s only a nightmare,” the Marine says. “It’s like waking up from a nasty dream in the course of the night time, drenched in sweat, terrified.”
Andriy’s detention lasted for much longer than his spouse’s: two and a half years.
Three months in the past, upon his launch within the prisoner trade, Andriy met his two-year-old son, Leon, for the primary time. When the couple was captured by Russian forces, Lena didn’t know she was pregnant.
“When I discovered I used to be pregnant, I cried, first with pleasure, however then with disappointment, as a result of I could not inform my husband.”
“I used to be continually writing him letters, telling him that he was lastly going to have a baby that he had wished for therefore lengthy,” Lena says, her eyes teary. “But he hasn’t obtained a single letter.”
I ask Andriy what it was like to satisfy his son for the primary time. “I believed I used to be the happiest individual on the earth,” he says, smiling.
While the BBC can’t independently confirm every little thing Lena and Andriy instructed us, their accounts are confirmed by worldwide organizations, which have interviewed tons of of Ukrainian prisoners of warfare.
The UN says Russia topics Ukrainian prisoners to “widespread and systematic torture and ill-treatment… together with extreme beatings, electrical shock, sexual violence, suffocation, extended stress positions, pressured extreme bodily train, sleep deprivation, feigning executions, threats of violence and humiliation.”
In an announcement to the BBC, the Russian embassy in London mentioned: “The allegations described by you’re patently false. The captured Ukrainian militants are handled humanely and in full compliance with the provisions of the related Russian laws and the Geneva Convention. They are supplied with good high quality meals, shelter, medical care, non secular and mental nourishment.”
Andriy is present process rehabilitation at a medical facility in Lviv. But he nonetheless has time to benefit from the holidays along with his spouse and son. It is the Turas household’s first Christmas collectively and the very best reward for little Leon is having dad at dwelling.
But many Ukrainians are nonetheless desperately ready for information of their family members. In central Kiev, kin and activists collect for a particular Christmas rally to demand the discharge of Ukrainian prisoners.
They stand for hours within the bitter chilly, alongside one of many capital’s predominant roads, whereas passing motorists honk their horns in a deafening cacophony of solidarity.
“We hope for a Christmas miracle,” says Tetiana, whose son Artem, 24, was captured nearly three years in the past, “The launch of my son is my deepest want. I imagined our assembly 100 instances, when He and I hug one another, and his eyes gentle up and he is lastly in his homeland.”
Also on the protest is 29-year-old Liliya Ivashchyk, a dancer from the Kiev National Operetta Theater, holding a pink signal. Russian forces took her boyfriend Bohdan prisoner in 2022. She has had no contact with him since then.
“I may say it is onerous for me to be alone, however I do not need to say it, as a result of I at all times take into consideration how he’s over there,” Liliya says.
Backstage on the theater, Liliya reveals us the messages she sends Bohdan nearly on daily basis: photos of little hearts. “I miss him so much. He must be saved and to have his freedom again,” she says, her decrease lip trembling. Messages are unread.
Liliya invitations us to see her carry out a particular present on Christmas Day. The dance is a celebration favourite in Ukraine: Johann Strauss’s Waltz of the Blue Danube, written in 1866 to raise the spirits of Austrian audiences after a warfare. The theater is full.
“The Christmas holidays are a painful time,” he says as he prepares to go on stage. “There’s actually no get together ambiance.”
At the top of the present, spectators rush to gather their coats. After almost three years of warfare, nearly everybody right here has a beloved one combating on the entrance strains, a prisoner or killed in battle.
“Many individuals in Ukraine are going through tough conditions,” says Liliya. “We’re simply ready for the time once we can have a good time collectively once more. We want to recollect to thank our army that we have now holidays.”
