‘Stop playing dirty games,’ say Ukrainian officials in strongly-worded statement

Paul Adams

Diplomatic correspondent, reporting from Kyiv

Ukrainian officials have responded angrily to Russian suggestions that Ukraine is holding up an agreed prisoner swap.

The latest statement from Ukraine’s Coordination HQ for prisoners of war (POWs) says that earlier Russian comments “do not correspond to reality or to previous agreements — neither regarding the prisoner exchange nor the repatriation of bodies”.

The Coordination HQ says that teams from both sides have been working on the repatriation of bodies and an exchange of POWs since the two sides last met in Istanbul on Monday.

It says that Ukraine has submitted its lists, according to clearly defined categories (severely wounded, ill, young servicemen, etc) but that Russia has submitted “alternative lists that do not correspond to the agreed-upon approach”.

On the repatriation of bodies, Ukraine says agreement has been reached, but no date set. It says that Russia “undertook unilateral steps that had not been coordinated within the joint process”.

“Unfortunately, instead of constructive dialogue, we are once again faced with manipulations and attempts to exploit sensitive humanitarian issues for informational purposes,” the statement says.

It ends by urging Russia to “stop playing dirty games” and to implement an agreement “clearly and without delay in the coming days”.

Families of Ukraine’s missing fear peace will not bring them home

2 days ago Share Save Joel Gunter Reporting from Bucha, Ukraine Share Save

BBC Tatyana Popvytch’s son was taken to Russia. “He is so vulnerable,” she said. “I worry that he will lose his sanity there.”

Tatyana Popovytch had contacted every agency she could think of. She had walked every step her son Vladislav could have taken after the Russians opened fire at his car, leaving him to flee with a bullet in his leg. She had looked in mass graves, reviewed pictures of the dead, watched exhumations. And after a month, she knew no more than when she had started. Then a stranger called. Serhii had just been released from a Russian prison in Kursk. At morning roll call, the prisoners could not see one another, but they could hear each person state their full name and home village. Serhii memorised as many names and places as he could – 10 in total, he said – and on 9 May 2022 he called Tatyana to say that he had heard her son’s voice. Like Vladislav, Serhii was a civilian captured from Bucha at the start of the war, when hundreds of civilians were taken from this area. Vladislav was 29 at the time. Now 32, he is still in the prison in Kursk. Serhii couldn’t explain to Tatyana why he had been released and Vladislav hadn’t. Tatyana was just glad to hear that her son was alive. “I was so overjoyed I lost the stutter I’d had since he was taken,” she said. Three years later, to the day, Tatyana was sitting in a café in Bucha, not far from where her son was abducted, looking over the scant evidence that he was still alive: two letters from him – short, boilerplate texts, written in Russian, telling her he was well fed and well looked after. Each letter had taken around three months to reach Tatyana, making it hard for her to feel very connected to her son at any point in time. “My son is very gentle and sensitive,” she said, with the pained expression of a parent who cannot protect their child. She was looking at pictures of Vlad ballroom dancing – a hobby from a young age. “He is so vulnerable,” she said. “I worry that he will lose his sanity there.”

Julia Hripun with a picture of her captive father. She has launched an charity to help bring civilians home.

According to Ukrainian authorities, nearly 16,000 Ukrainian civilians are still in captivity in Russian prisons after being abducted by the invading army – not counting the more than 20,000 Ukrainian children estimated to have been taken to Russia. There are growing fears now among their many thousands of loved ones, amid the apparent progress towards peace talks, that they could be forgotten or lost in the process. And those fears appear to be justified. Under the Geneva Convention, there is a recognised mechanism for exchanging prisoners of war, but no such mechanism exists for the return of captured civilians, leaving even top Ukrainian and international officials searching for an explanation as to how they might be brought home. “When I attend official meetings, at the ombudsman’s office or elsewhere, no one talks about getting the civilians back in the event of a ceasefire,” said Yulia Hripun, 23, whose father was kidnapped early on in the war from a village just west of Kyiv. In the weeks after learning of her father’s captivity, Yulia used Facebook to contact another daughter of an imprisoned Ukrainian and the pair launched a new organisation to campaign for all the civilians’ release. The group has met representatives from the UN, the European Parliament, the governments of several EU countries and the US embassy in Ukraine. “We spoke with them but it came down to the fact that they honestly don’t understand what’s going to happen,” Yulia said, of meeting the Americans. “The only thing they said is that Trump is interested in the issue of deported children and that maybe civilians could somehow fit into that category. But they are actually different categories that can’t be combined.” Worryingly for Yulia and other relatives of the captured civilians, top Ukrainian officials are not pretending to have a stronger idea. “I do not see the real, effective approach to returning the civilian detainees to Ukraine,” said Dmytro Lubinets, the country’s human rights ombudsman. “We do not have a legal basis or the mechanisms for returning them,” he said, frankly.

Petro Sereda with a picture of his missing son. “You want to believe he is coming home,” Petro said.

Preparation is underway for the prisoner exchange agreed upon by Ukraine and Russia during the second round of talks in Istanbul. However, Moscow is attempting to interfere with disinformation. This was reported by RBC-Ukraine, citing sources.

“The Russian side is doing everything to interfere with this informationally, with a lot of different disinformation. For example, about repatriation, exchange of bodies all for all. This is fake news spread by the Russians through their officials,” a source told RBC-Ukraine.

As is known, recently one of the Russian representatives, Vladimir Rogov, claimed that the exchange of bodies of deceased soldiers between Ukraine and Russia had begun. He also accused the Ukrainian side of allegedly refusing to collect over 500 bodies. These statements were immediately denied by the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War.

Prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russia

As a reminder, during the negotiations in Istanbul, the Ukrainian and Russian sides agreed to conduct another large-scale exchange. However, this time it will involve not only prisoners but also the bodies of the deceased.

Ukraine and Russia agreed to exchange all seriously wounded and critically ill prisoners, young soldiers up to 25 years old, and to return the bodies of 6,000 deceased.

As President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated, the first exchange could take place as early as this weekend. According to him, Russia was ready to transfer 500 people on Saturday and Sunday.

‘Massive’ Russian strike days after air base attacks

3 days ago Share Save Ian Casey BBC News Reporting from London Paul Adams Correspondent Reporting from Kyiv Jaroslav Lukiv BBC News Share Save

Russia launches drone and missile attack on Kyiv

Russia launched a “massive” drone and missile strike on Ukraine’s capital and other areas early on Friday, days after Ukraine’s surprise attack on its air bases. Five people were killed and 80 injured, Ukrainian officials said, with cruise missiles and hundreds of drones launched. Strikes targeted the capital Kyiv, and the northern city of Chernihiv, as well as Lutsk and Ternopil in the north-west. Russia said the strikes were in response to “terrorist acts by the Kyiv regime”, saying military sites were targeted. Moscow also reported downing 174 Ukrainian drones over parts of Russia and occupied Crimea. Neptune anti-ship cruise missiles, it said, were intercepted over the Black Sea.

Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russia’s defence ministry said its armed forces had “launched a massive strike with high-precision long-range air, sea and ground-based weapons, as well as attack drones” on Thursday night. The attack came after Putin warned US President Donald Trump he would respond to Ukraine’s recent strikes in several Russian regions. Late on Friday, Trump told reporters that the Ukrainians had given “Putin a reason to go in and bomb the hell out of them last night”. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov described the war in Ukraine as “existential” for Russia, saying it was an “issue of our national interests, an issue of our security”. Moscow blamed Ukraine for three bomb attacks on railways in Russia’s western Bryansk and Kursk regions which reportedly killed seven people and injured more than 100 last weekend. Kyiv has not commented on those attacks. Ukraine did say however that it had carried out its largest long-range drone strikes on at least 40 Russian warplanes at four military bases deep inside Russia last Sunday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said 117 drones had been used in Operation Spider Web by the SBU security service , striking “34% of [Russia’s] strategic cruise missile carriers”. Ukrainian officials say Russia’s latest aerial assault included 38 cruise missiles, the kind Ukraine targeted on Sunday. Ukraine’s state emergencies service DSNS said the three people killed in Kyiv had all been its employees. One person was killed in Lutsk, and the body of another victim was pulled from the wreckage in Chernihiv late on Friday. Zelensky said the Russian attack had used more than 400 drones. “Now is exactly the moment when America, Europe, and everyone around the world can stop this war together by pressuring Russia,” he added. In a thinly veiled reference to Trump’s apparent unwillingness to put pressure on Russia, he added: “If someone is not applying pressure and is giving the war more time to take lives – that is complicity and accountability.”

Ros Atkins on… how Ukraine did Operation Spider Web

Air raid alerts were in place in Kyiv, where a residential building was hit, and the city’s metro system was disrupted after shelling damaged tracks. Tens of thousands of civilians in the capital spent a restless few hours in underground shelters. From the centre of the city, prolonged bursts of machine gun fire could be heard as air defences on the outskirts attempted to bring down scores of drones aimed at the capital. From time to time, the distinctive buzz of drones overhead could also be heard. Bright flashes of light, sometimes reflected on nearby buildings, would be followed, five or 10 seconds later, by thunderous explosions. In Ternopil, military chief Vyacheslav Negoda said Friday’s strike had been the “most massive air attack on our region to date”, injuring five people and damaging homes and schools.

EPA Ukraine said the three confirmed victims in Kyiv were all employees of the state emergency service DSNS

Wagner to withdraw from Mali after ‘completing mission’

The Russian mercenary group claimed responsibility for killing “thousands of militants and their commanders” in the West African nation

The withdrawal announcement comes the same day as reports that Malian soldiers had pulled out from a major base in the centre of the country, after it came under a second deadly attack in less than a week.

In a message on its Telegram channel, Wagner said it had “fought terrorism side-by-side with the people of Mali”, killing “thousands of militants and their commanders, who terrorised civilians for years”.

The Russian mercenary group has been operating there since 2021, working with the military to challenge Islamist militants.

The Wagner Group has announced it is withdrawing from Mali following what it called “the completion of its main mission” in the West African country.

Mali has been grappling with a militant Islamist insurgency for more than a decade.

Following accusations that the government had been failing to deal with this insecurity, the military seized power a few years ago.

French troops, which were originally deployed to help the civilian government, left the country in 2022. By then, the junta in charge of Mali had already begun working with the Russian mercenaries to combat the insurgents.

There has been a resurgence in jihadist attacks on military bases in the Sahel state in recent weeks.

Last Sunday, an al-Qaeda linked group said it had carried out a major attack on the town of Boulikessi and the army base there.

More than 30 soldiers were killed, according to sources quoted by the news agency Reuters.

Then on Monday, the same group – Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (JNIM) – said it targeted the military in the historic city of Timbuktu, with residents reporting hearing gunfire and explosions.

Insurgents also attacked an army post in the village of Mahou in the southeastern Sikasso region, killing five.

Locals told the news agency AFP that soldiers withdrew from the Boulkessi base on after a new assault on Thursday led to multiple deaths.

A military source said the departure was “strategic” and “at the request of the hierarchy”, the news agency reported.

The increased assaults in the Sahel region have raised concerns about the efficacy of Wagner in the region.

Although the paramilitary group has announced its exit from Mali, Russian forces will still play an active role in the country’s security landscape.

Fighters from Africa Corps – a rival Russian mercenary force intended to absorb Wagner’s activities on the continent – will remain in Mali.

Russia has an increasing military, political and economic influence in West and Central Africa.

Friday’s announcement did not state whether Wagner would be leaving the Central African Republic, where its African headquarters are located.