Ukraine returned four marines and two civilians in a POW exchange
“The officers — Oleksiy Bulakhov and Mykola Kostenko,” he said.
“The soldiers are Lyudmila Gerasimenko and Ivan Zemlyanoy. The civilians are Victoria Andrusha and Yana Maiboroda."
Yermak added that the returned military personnel were part of the defense of Mariupol.
The civilians, meanwhile, were all captured by the invading Russian forces. According to Yermak, on March 27, Russian soldiers took Andrusha from her home because they found data regarding the Russian vehicles on her phone, which she passed on to the Armed Forces of Ukraine. She was taken to Russian and held at the Kursk pretrial detention center.
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Maiboroda was captured due to the fact that her phone included photographs of Russian vehicles in the Chornobyl zone.
The exchanges are ongoing, and our goal is to bring back all of our people,” said Yermak.
“We are working on this non-stop, and we will definitely do it.”
On Sept. 21, Ukraine held the largest prisoner exchange since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion. Among the 215 people released from Russian captivity, 188 were defenders of Azovstal and Mariupol, including commanders from Azovstal (currently in Turkey), as well as ten international volunteers, some of whom were threatened with the death penalty by the invaders – they were evacuated to Saudi Arabia.
Five of the Azov commanders were exchanged for 55 Russian soldiers, and in exchange for the rest, Ukraine transferred former oligarch and politician Viktor Medvedchuk, who is currently charged with treason, to Russia.
Read the original article on The New Voice of Ukraine
