KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ten Ukrainians imprisoned for years were released from Russian captivity Friday through the mediation of the Vatican, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.
Part of the group arrived by helicopter at night at Kiev’s international airport, which has been closed since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. It was the first time the airport had received passengers in more than two years. The rest of the group arrived by bus.
Some of the freed citizens were captured before the Russian invasion. It is rare for people to be released after 2014, when Russia illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
Among the freedmen was Nariman Dzhelyal, deputy head of the Mejlis, a representative body of the Crimean Tatars that was moved to Kiev after Russia conquered the peninsula. He was taken from Crimea a year before the war, where he lived despite the annexation.
“I was imprisoned, where many Ukrainians are still,” he said. “We can’t leave them there, because the conditions, both psychological and physical, are very frightening there.”
In the airport’s main hall, where pre-war advertisements still hang, former prisoners, draped in blue and yellow flags, reunited with their families and called those who could not be there. For some, the separation had lasted many years.
‘I really want to hug you. I will be with you soon, Mom,” Isabella Pekh, the daughter of released art historian Olena Pekh, said via video call. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t meet you.”
For almost six years, Isabella Pekh spoke at international conferences and appealed to foreign ambassadors for help in freeing her mother, who was being held in the occupied part of the Donetsk region. Ultimately, her efforts succeeded.
“It was six years of hell that words cannot describe. But I knew I had my homeland, I had people who loved me, I had my daughter,” said Olena Pekh.
Two priests were among those who returned on Friday. One of them, Bohdan Heleta, was detained in 2022 in his church in the occupied city of Berdiansk in the Zaporizhia region.
According to the Ukrainian Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, 3,310 Ukrainians have already been released from Russian captivity. But many thousands, both civilians and military, remain imprisoned.
