Ukraine and Russia swap prisoners following UAE talks
Ukraine and Russia completed the second day of U.S.-brokered talks in Abu Dhabi and agreed on a major prisoner swap for the first time in five months, officials said.
US President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff said that the delegations from the USA, Ukraine and Russia agreed on the exchange of 314 prisoners of war.
Witkoff described the peace talks as “detailed and productive” in a post on he said.
Ukraine-Russia peace talks supported by the United States will continue in the near future, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said after the completion of the negotiations on Thursday.
He added that the Ukrainian negotiating team raised the issue of exchanging more prisoners of war with the Russian delegation.
Home 🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦Вдома 🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/ZbTk96D3lh— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) February 5, 2026
Both Russia and Ukraine also said the talks have been positive so far.
A Ukrainian official said the talks are now complete.
Late Wednesday, Ukraine’s chief negotiator Rustam Umerov hailed the first day of talks as “meaningful and productive, focusing on concrete steps and practical solutions.”
On Thursday, Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev said progress had been made and positive progress had been made.
He also said that active work continues to revitalize Russia’s relations with the United States within the framework of the US-Russia economic working group.
“Warmongers from Europe, from Britain are constantly trying to interfere in this process, constantly trying to interfere. And the more such attempts there are, the more we see that progress is definitely being made,” Dmitriev said.
Russia accused Ukraine’s European allies of prolonging the war with their support for Ukraine.
Russia’s state news agency RIA later reported, citing the defense ministry, that Russia and Ukraine had exchanged 157 prisoners of war each.
Three civilians from the Kursk region were also extradited to Russia.
The agreement regarding the prisoner exchange came after a long time.
The last change occurred in October 2025.
The prisoner of war exchange was the only concrete step towards peace to emerge from a previous round of talks between Ukraine and Russia, held in Türkiye last year.
Hundreds of thousands of soldiers from both sides were killed, wounded or missing during the nearly four-year war.
Zelenskiy said this week that nearly 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers were killed on the battlefield.
However, he did not provide details on the number of injured or missing Ukrainian soldiers.
US-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies said Russia suffered approximately 1.2 million casualties during the war.
Russian officials rejected the report as unreliable.
The fate of the eastern Donetsk region is one of the most complex issues in the negotiations.
As a precondition for any deal, Russia wants Ukraine to withdraw its troops from the entire Donetsk region, including heavily fortified cities considered some of Ukraine’s strongest defenses.
Ukraine has said the conflict should be frozen on existing front lines and has rejected a unilateral withdrawal of its forces.
Ukraine says it wants control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, located in territory under Russian control.
The head of state nuclear company Rosatom said on Thursday that Russia is ready for international cooperation on the Zaporozhye plant, including with the United States, but that the plant must belong to Russia.
Russia occupies about 20 percent of Ukraine’s territory, including Crimea and parts of the eastern Donbas region captured before the 2022 invasion.
Analysts say Russian forces have captured about 1.5 percent of Ukrainian territory since the beginning of 2024.
