- Russia hasn't done a single prisoner-of-war exchange with Ukraine in months, the spokesperson for Ukraine's Coordination Center for the Treatment of Prisoners of War said.
- The last prisoner swap was on August 7, Yatsenko said.
Russia has not done a single prisoner-of-war exchange with Ukraine since early August, Petro Yatsenko, the spokesperson for Ukraine's Coordination Center for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, said.
The last prisoner swap was on August 7, Yatsenko said in a recent interview, and involved 22 Ukrainian soldiers being sent home.
"Since the summer, Russia has actually frozen exchanges," he said. "They do not occur to the extent that they did before."
Yatsenko added that Ukraine is "ready to engage" with Russia and that "we now have many prisoners of war."
He said that detention facilities in Ukraine are "filling up, and we don't need to hold these Russian prisoners of war at all. We would gladly exchange them even tomorrow for our defenders."
The Times reported that as of November 17, 2,589 Ukrainian prisoners of war have been returned to Ukraine.
However, the Institute for the Study of War said that it's unclear how many Ukrainian soldiers are being held captive in Russia and how many Russian soldiers are held captive by Ukraine.
Yatsenko said in the November 17 interview that Ukrainian prisoners held captive by Russia are facing "significantly worse" conditions under detention than Russian prisoners face in Ukrainian captivity.
He also suggested that Russia's treatment of captured Ukrainian soldiers falls short of the conditions outlined in the Geneva Conventions.
Yatsenko went on to say that Russia is "not interested in the fate of their own prisoners of war. For the Russian side, they are simply bargaining chips and meat for artillery."