What the late-December 2024 prisoner swap meant for Ukraine
A retrospective on the exchange of hundreds of prisoners of war brokered by the United Arab Emirates, reviewed from the eve of the new year.
What did the exchange of prisoners of war on the cusp of 1 January 2025 amount to? On 30 December 2024, Russia and Ukraine swapped hundreds of prisoners of war in a deal brokered by the United Arab Emirates, days before the date this review looks back on.
Ukraine said that many of those released by Russia were soldiers captured during the Siege of Mariupol in 2022. For families of those troops, the release marked the end of a captivity that had lasted more than two years.
Why the exchange mattered
The swap showed that, even amid full-scale war, the two sides could still reach agreements through a third-party mediator. The United Arab Emirates acted as the broker, which placed a Gulf state at the centre of a humanitarian channel between Kyiv and Moscow.
The stakes for those exchanged were high. Prisoners of war in the Russo-Ukrainian war have been subjected to several forms of abuse, including mistreatment, exposure to public curiosity, torture and even execution. Each return of captured soldiers therefore carried a significance beyond numbers.
Looking back
As 2025 began, the exchange stood as the most recent such deal. It also underlined a point for Ukrainian public life: the fate of defenders captured at Mariupol remained a matter of national concern, and Ukraine publicly highlighted their release.
