Russia, Ukraine agree to 'biggest' prisoner release after Abu Dhabi talks

After two days of US-mediated talks in Abu Dhabi, Russia and Ukraine have agreed to the release of their prisoners, US envoy Jared Kushner confirmed on Wednesday. "One of the positives is that we agreed that we're going to have the biggest humanitarian release of prisoners, and we're going to finalise the numbers tomorrow," he said.

Kushner and fellow US mediator Steve Witkoff are set to travel to Moscow on Thursday in order to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin, and then to Dublin to debrief Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. In these five years since the conflict erupted, both sides have exchanged thousands of captured soldiers.

Despite ongoing diplomatic efforts, the two sides remain far from a ceasefire deal in a conflict that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. The latest round of talks in Abu Dhabi followed this familiar pattern, yielding little beyond a prisoner exchange agreement and a commitment to continue negotiations, the only tangible results either side cited in their post-talks statements. Russia’s Vladimir Medinsky and Ukraine’s Rustem Umerov both confirmed the large-scale prisoner swap, though specific numbers are yet to be disclosed.

The context of the talks has shifted since the last meeting in February in Geneva, where the Trump administration has to reckon with Democrats in order to demand more support for Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russia’s wartime economy is completely under pressure, and Ukraine is facing devastating aerial attacks on its power grid.