A CITY IN NORTHERN UKRAINE — Ukraine and Russia began the exchange of 1,000 prisoners of war Friday, the largest such swap since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

“We are bringing our people home,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on social media, after the soldiers had crossed into Ukraine. Shortly after they had crossed, he posted several photos of the freed Ukrainians, many draped in the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag.

He said 390 people were included in the first of a three-day exchange. “This agreement was reached at a meeting in Turkey,” he added, “and it is important to fully implement it.”

The Ukrainian authorities asked NPR not to disclose the location out of security concerns. An area with so many Ukrainian soldiers and civilians gathered in one place could be at risk of a strike.

This POW exchange was the only deal made in Istanbul last week during the two countries’ first direct negotiations about a ceasefire since the early days of Russia’s 2022 invasion.

Even before the exchange was announced on Friday, President Trump took to social media saying it was completed.

Ukrainian authorities said 270 soldiers and 120 civilians were included in Friday’s exchange.

Zelenskyy’s office said earlier this month that more than 8,000 Ukrainian soldiers are estimated to have been captured by Russia since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. According to Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman, more than 16,000 Ukrainian civilians are also in Russian captivity.

One of those civilians is Volodymyr Mykolayenko, the former mayor of the southern city of Kherson. His niece Hanna Korsun-Samchuk told NPR that Russian forces took him away after occupying the city for several months in 2022.

“I’ve been trying to raise the issue of civilian prisoners because there’s no easy procedure for exchanging them,” she said on Monday in an interview in Kherson.

Dozens of Ukrainian families waited for hours in a leafy courtyard for the liberated prisoners of war, hoping their loved ones would be among them. They held banners, flags and posters emblazoned with images of their loved ones, all soldiers.

Katya Kobel, who is from the northern city of Chernihiv, wept as she spoke about her husband, Hryhori, who has been in Russian captivity since December 2023. She says she found he was captured in the eastern Donetsk region after receiving text messages with photos of her husband from a Russian number.

“They told me, ‘We have captured your man,’ ” she said.

Natalia Apetyk is hoping her 23-year-old son, Yelizar, will finally come home. He has been in Russian captivity since 2022, when he was captured while defending eastern Ukraine from a Russian incursion.

“Today it is exactly three years since his last call, and tomorrow it will be three years since he disappeared,” she said.

Eighteen-year-old Milena Moroz is holding a photograph of her father, Yevhen, who was taken prisoner in February of this year in eastern Ukraine. She says she didn’t see her father as much as she would have liked, since her parents are divorced.

She is waiting to tell him something important, something she wished she had told him more often: “I love you, Dad.”

NPR’s Hanna Palamarenko contributed to this report from Kyiv.

Copyright 2025 NPR

Undergraduate students at a New Jersey college have helped to identify the skeletal remains of a sea captain who made his final, ill-fated voyage nearly 200 years ago.

Henry Goodsell was the 29-year-old captain of the schooner Oriental, which was hired in 1844 to deliver 60 tons of marble to a Philadelphia boarding school, according to research released this week from the Ramapo College of New Jersey Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center (IGG).

After setting sail from Connecticut, the ship made it within a mile of the shoreline before a leak in the vessel dragged Goodsell and his small crew to their watery graves, according to the college.

Between 1995 and 2013, a skull and bone fragments washed ashore on the beaches of South Jersey, including in Longport, Margate and Ocean City.

Having made little progress on the case known as “Scattered Man John Doe,” in the fall of 2023, the New Jersey State Police partnered with the IGG to try to put a name to the remains.

Using investigative genetic genealogy — which combines consumer DNA testing, like 23andMe, with genealogical research — the students set to work to solve the mystery.

A sample from the bones was uploaded to genetic genealogy company Intermountain Forensics — a nonprofit that works with law enforcement to help identify human remains through DNA — which then submitted it to DNA matching sites GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA in February 2024.

This year, through researching reported shipwrecks in the area and genealogy of the tested sample, the team made a breakthrough in identifying Goodsell.

“Using modern genealogy testing to identify bone fragments from the 19th century is a powerful reminder of our unwavering commitment to resolving cases no matter how old,” Patrick Callahan, New Jersey State Police superintendent, said in a statement.

“The ability to bring answers to families — even generations later — shows how far science and dedication can take us. Our partnership with Ramapo College has been instrumental in making this possible, and we are incredibly proud of the meaningful progress we continue to make together,” he said.

Ramapo officials said the Goodsell case is one of the oldest cold case identifications using this form of identification.

Since launching the IGG in late 2022, the program has been consulted on 92 cold cases and has successfully helped identify more than a dozen human remains nationwide.

Copyright 2025 NPR

The change comes two weeks after Republican Congressmembers Mark Amodei of Nevada and Celeste Maloy of Utah introduced the measure to sell off public lands in their respective states for development and affordable housing. The move received strong opposition from advocates, Democrats, and some Republicans, including Representative Ryan Zinke of Montana, who served as the Secretary of Interior during President Donald Trump’s first term.

In fact, shortly after Amodei and Maloy’s last-minute amendment, Zinke formed the bipartisan Public Lands Caucus with Democratic Representative Gabe Vasquez of New Mexico. The Montana Congressman’s clear-cut opposition to the amendment led the charge to strip public land sales out of the “ One Big Beautiful Bill Act. ”

In a statement, Zinke said, in part, “I do not support the widespread sale or transfer of public lands. Once the land is sold, we will never get it back.”

Conservationists are calling it a win for all Americans.

“The precedent that this would have set for the way public lands are managed across the United States would have been a horrific one to set,” said Olivia Tanager, director of the Sierra Club Toiyabe Chapter. “We know that public lands are held in perpetuity for future generations.”

Tanager added that Zinke’s leadership “really demonstrated that people across political spectrums care deeply about our public places, about our ecosystems.”

While the threat of selling public lands is over for now, Congressman Amodei said in a press release he will “continue to push for the responsible management of underused lands in Nevada,” adding, “The fight is far from over.”

This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.