Amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, Kyiv is working to resume prisoner exchanges with Russia, hoping to secure the release of 1,200 Ukrainians, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his Security Council chief said, Reuters reported.
“We are counting on the resumption of exchanges,” Zelenskiy said in a video posted on the Telegram messaging app on Sunday. “Many meetings, negotiations and calls are now devoted to this.”
Reuters reported that the head of Ukraine’s Security Council, Rustem Umerov, said on Saturday that he had held meetings with Kyiv’s partners in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates and agreed to reactivate the Istanbul agreements. He also discussed the possibility of reviving the prisoner exchange process at the meeting.
The “Istanbul agreements” are prisoner-exchange understandings reached in 2022 with Turkish mediation, which set the rules for a widely planned exchange system between Russia and Ukraine.
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Since then, Kyiv and Moscow have exchanged thousands of prisoners, although the exchanges have been sporadic and the process has been consistently disrupted as conflict intensified on the frontlines of Russia’s war against Ukraine in February 2022.
Reuters’s reporting contributed to this article.