Russia and Ukraine exchanged 205 prisoners of war on Friday, opening the first stage of a planned 1,000-for-1,000 swap as Kyiv marked a day of mourning for 24 people killed in a Russian strike on a residential block.
Most of the Ukrainian prisoners had been held since 2022. The swap came just hours after rescue workers finished searching the ruins of a nine-storey apartment block in Kyiv’s Darnytskyi district, where 24 people were killed, including three girls.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the building had been practically levelled to the ground by a Russian X-101 cruise missile. Rescue services said their search of the rubble of the block, completed on Friday, closed a 28-hour operation that began after Thursday’s strike reduced 18 flats to rubble. Most of those destroyed homes were single-room apartments or the bathrooms and kitchens of two-room flats, a measure of how completely the blast tore through the building.
The exchange and the mourning were bound together by the same war, but they pointed in different directions. One was a rare release of captives from both sides. The other was the latest reminder of how the fighting keeps reaching civilian homes. The prisoner swap was presented as the first stage of a broader deal, with 1,000 people on each side expected to be exchanged if the process holds.
Zelensky said pressure had to be brought to bear on Russia, which he said deliberately destroys lives and hopes to remain unpunished. That message landed on a day when Kyiv was already lowered into grief, with the city observing the victims of the strike, among them the three girls, aged 12, 15 and 15.
Friday also brought more violence beyond Kyiv. Russian officials said four people, including a child, were killed when Ukrainian drones hit the city of Ryazan, south-east of Moscow, and 28 people were hurt. The exchange of prisoners was part of a short-lived ceasefire that ended this week with massive Russian strikes across Ukraine, underscoring how quickly even limited pauses can give way to renewed attacks.
For the families waiting on both sides, the swap offered a brief lift. For Kyiv, the day ended where it began: with a city still counting the dead, and a war that keeps turning homes into rubble before it turns back to negotiations.
