Russia and Ukraine swap 205 prisoners each in US-brokered deal

Russia and Ukraine exchanged 205 prisoners of war each on Friday, Moscow's defense ministry announced, marking the first stage of a planned 1,000-for-1,000 swap that U.S. President Donald Trump had announced the previous week as part of a U.S.-brokered three-day ceasefire around Russia's Victory Day commemorations. The exchange, mediated with assistance from the United Arab Emirates, saw Russian servicemen transported to Belarus for psychological and medical assistance before returning to Russia for further treatment. Ukraine confirmed the swap, reporting that the freed group includes members of the army, navy, air force, territorial defense forces, National Guard, and Border Guard Service, with almost all held for four years and most captured during the fighting in Mariupol in 2022. The prisoner exchange comes amid broader developments in Russia's prison system, as the country has seen its inmate population drop by nearly 40 percent over five years. According to Arkady Gostev, head of Russia's penitentiary service, the prison population fell from 465,000 at the end of 2021 to 282,000 currently, driven in part by the military's recruitment of inmates to fight in Ukraine, with offers of army contracts and the possibility of buying out their sentences if they survive. Gostev noted that the decline was also due to more suspended sentences and alternative forms of punishment being handed out by courts. Gostev added that thousands of prisoners are currently working on production sites supporting the war effort, contributing to Russia's wartime economy, with some 16,000 inmates deployed specifically for manufacturing over the past year alone. The prison production generated goods worth approximately 5.5 billion rubles for the "special military operation" and a total volume of 47 billion rubles across all prison sites in 2025. Russia has experienced a significant labor shortage during its offensive, with hundreds of thousands of men at the front lines and a similar number having fled the country following mobilization. The prisoner exchanges remain one of the few remaining areas of cooperation between the two sides, still at war since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.