In some cases, Moscow and Kyiv use intermediaries, including Turkey, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, the Vatican, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
But most of the wartime bartering is done directly, by individual representatives, including in tough and unpleasant face-to-face meetings on the Ukrainian-Russian border and in Istanbul, as well as phone calls, according to some Ukrainian officials involved in the discussions.
Neither side is keen to advertise the existence of these back channels.
“It’s very, very emotionally difficult,” said Dmytro Usov, a Ukrainian military intelligence official who heads a coordination center overseeing prisoner exchange negotiations.
“They are the enemy, but if we talk about the negotiation process, this conflict of interest has to be overcome,” Usov said. “We understand that whatever has happened, whatever the relationship we have now, we as Ukrainians are interested in the return of our defenders and if we reject every communication channel, we won’t be able to do that.”
Intermediaries are a fallback. “If we can do it ourselves, then we will resolve it,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said.
Given Russia’s brutal attempt to topple Ukraine’s government and steal its territory, there has been little room for negotiation to stop the war. In March 2022, a series of official peace talks failed. Instead, Ukraine and Russia have fallen back on a basic point of mutual self-interest: exchanging prisoners of war.
On the Russian side, negotiating on POW exchanges is done by a coordination center under the Russian Defense Ministry, which also includes Russia’s security service, the FSB. Individual Russian politicians and fighting formations like the Wagner mercenary group and Akhmat, controlled by Chechnya’s strongman leader Ramzan Kadyrov, have also lobbied for specific prisoners to be released, Usov said.
The Geneva Conventions call for prisoners of war to be exchanged after fighting has ended. But Usov said Ukraine is eager to get its captured fighters back as quickly as possible because of evidence, documented by the United Nations, that some have been tortured.
Neither side will disclose how many soldiers have been captured.
The POW exchanges, along with exchanges of bodies of dead soldiers, mostly take place in Ukraine’s northeast Sumy region, the only stretch of the Ukraine-Russia border where Russian forces are not actively trying to advance. Still, shelling occurs daily and a cease-fire is typically declared during any trades.
About twice a month, refrigerated vans full of bodies are driven to the border by Russian and Ukrainian emergency service workers who unload and reload the dead, said Oleh Kotenko, a Ukrainian official who oversaw transfers and the search for missing soldiers until September.
Experts from the International Committee of the Red Cross check the documentation, and members of the Russian and Ukrainian security services observe, Kotenko said.
“The time, place and number of bodies is agreed with the Russian side,” Kotenko said. The line of communication was initiated by the ICRC in summer 2022, Kotenko said.
“It is necessary to agree on something with the enemy, on humanitarian missions,” Kotenko said, adding that otherwise “1,700 men would not have been buried with dignity, like heroes.”
Turkey has become the main place for the two sides to advance negotiations when they stall. It was chosen as a neutral territory after the brief round of peace talks in Belarus in March 2022 were literally poisoned — with several members of the Ukrainian delegation falling mysteriously ill.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has successfully cultivated ties to Moscow and Kyiv, condemning Russia’s invasion while rejecting Western sanctions and acting as conduit for Russia’s financial sector.
There have been a few publicized meetings between Ukrainian and Russian officials in Istanbul, but talks are often not disclosed and the total number is unknown.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, who declined an interview request, was among the officials leading the Istanbul-based talks until September. An ethnic Crimean Tatar, who is fluent in Turkish, Umerov developed connections in Turkey while negotiating the release of Crimean Tatar prisoners following Russia’s 2014 invasion of the peninsula.
After several months of talks, a grain deal was announced in July 2022.
Ukraine’s deputy infrastructure minister Yuriy Vaskov, who participated, said there were no one-on-one meetings between Ukrainians and Russians on grain. Instead, talks took place in a four-sided format: Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and the United Nations.
After discussions on the sidelines of the grain talks, the biggest prisoner swap so far was agreed, Usov said: 215 Ukrainians and 10 foreign fighters were traded in September 2022, for 55 Russian officers and pro-Russian Ukrainian politician and Viktor Medvedchuk, a Putin ally.
The 215 Ukrainians went to Turkey, and the foreign fighters — five British citizens, two Americans, a Moroccan, a Croat, and a Swede — flew to Saudi Arabia.
Usov said involving Saudi Arabia and Turkey ensured that Russia was less likely to back out.
The most recent known POW exchange — 45 from each side — occurred in July.
Negotiations “can’t be done in such a way that one side has gotten more or less,” Usov said. “Each side has to be able to prove they’ve won in some way.”
The Vatican is another intermediary. Ukraine has been lobbying through the Catholic Church for the return of all noncombatants, including cooks, medics and other military personnel who do not fight. Under the Geneva Conventions, noncombatants should not be taken prisoner.
In a rare move for the Vatican, which prefers to deal with religious institutions, Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, was invited to meet Pope Francis last summer.
The Vatican’s work on noncombatants is still “in process,” Usov said.
Ukraine has passed messages and lists of names to the papal nuncio in Kyiv, Archbishop Visvaldas Kulbokas, who forwards them via the Holy See to the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, according to a Ukrainian official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. The head of Russia’s Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, then delivers the messages to the Kremlin.
This month, Qatar helped secure the return of four Ukrainian children from Russia, making it just the third country, after Turkey and Saudi Arabia, to broker a successful deal between Russia and Ukraine.
In March, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin and for Russia’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, accusing them of war crimes over the forced relocation of Ukrainian children. Russia has vehemently denied the allegations.
Generally, Russia releases children only to guardians, or their legal representatives, meaning parents or other relatives have to travel to Russia — a journey that can be impossible given war conditions.
Officials said there is a line of communication on missing children between Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets, and his Russian counterpart, Tatiana Moskalova, but it has not produced any results. They met in Istanbul on the margins of a conference in January.
Starting in March, however, groups of children have come back to Ukraine on a semiregular basis. They have been dropped off at a far western part of the Ukraine-Belarus border, cross over by foot, and are met in Ukraine by Save Ukraine, a nongovernmental organization.
Lubinets declined to elaborate on how the children coming via Belarus were being returned but, he said, it became easier after the arrest warrant for Putin was issued. “It is not yet time to say in detail how this happens,” Lubinets said.