The wife of a Ukrainian POW says her family and others like them have become pawns in a political game between Russia and Ukraine

• The wife of a Ukrainian POW said families like hers have become pawns in a geopolitical game.
• Russia "wants to discredit our government" and "cause havoc," Valentyna Tkachenko told Politico Europe.

The wife of a Ukrainian prisoner of war said her family and others like them have become pawns in a political game between Russia and Ukraine.

Valentyna Tkachenko, a mother-of-two from northern Ukraine, made the statement to Politico Europe.

"They started so well, exchanging so many," she told the outlet.

"But then suddenly it all stopped. I think Russians want to discredit our government. People are exhausted, and POWs' relatives are losing their temper. They want to cause havoc," she added.

Tkachenko's husband, Serhii, was guarding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, per the outlet. He was captured by Russian forces, along with 167 other soldiers, it said.

Since then, Tkachenko says she has only heard from him twice — once with a handwritten note saying "I am alive, everything is OK," which the wives of other POWs have also received.

And once when she received a video call from Serhii via the Viber messaging app.

During that three-minute conversation, Serhii refused to answer any of her questions and just kept saying: "Valya, go make things hard for Kyiv. Kyiv does not want to take us back," Tkachenko told the outlet.

Russia stopped exchanging POWs in early August, Petro Yatsenko, the spokesperson for Ukraine's Coordination Center for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, said in an interview last month.

According to Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, Russia is deliberately refusing to exchange POWs because it wants Ukrainian families to think they have been abandoned.

In a Telegram post published last month, Lubinets said Russia is refusing to swap POWs so "relatives of the defenders believe that the Ukrainian authorities aren't doing anything to return the soldiers," per a translation provided by the Kyiv Post.

About 200 relatives of Ukrainians captured defending Mariupol staged protests in Zaporizhzhia earlier this month, urging authorities to expedite negotiations on new prisoner exchanges, per the Ukrinform news agency.

But the protests seem to have had little impact.

During his end-of-year conference, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy admitted the process of exchanging POWs has been "slowed down," but vowed to bring back a "fairly decent number of our guys," according to a translation provided by Ukrainska Pravda.

"As soon as we accumulate, if you'll forgive me the language, the appropriate stockpile of enemy resources, we exchange them for our Ukrainian defenders," Zelenskyy said, adding: "I really hope that our pathway will soon be activated."