This civilian hostage release was part of the 53rd prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russia. The last political prisoner exchange took place in September 2019. For nearly five years, Russia had blocked the return of Ukrainian citizens it had illegally detained.
Kateryna Bryukhanova, Lyudmyla Honcharenko, Pavlo Kupriienko, Mykola Shvets, and Nataliya Zakharenko, who had been held in Belarus, are now back in Ukraine. Each of their stories is filled with pain, but that is now behind them.
The captivity in Russian prisons has also ended for five more Ukrainian civilians. These are Nariman Dzhelyal, Deputy Chairman of the Crimean Tatar Mejlis, who has been detained since 2021; Valeriy Matyushenko, who had not seen his family since 2017; Olena Pekh, awaited by her daughter since 2018; and Bohdan Heleta and Ivan Levytskyi, priests of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, who resisted the occupying forces in Berdyansk.
Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets published a post with photos of the returned Ukrainian civilians. He noted: “In the photos are our returned civilian citizens. This is how they looked before being captured by Russia and after they managed to return to their homeland.”
