Ten Ukrainians held for years by the Russians were released on Friday thanks to the mediation of the Vatican, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
Part of the group arrived by helicopter during the night from Friday to Saturday at Kyiv International Airport, which has been closed since the invasion of the country by the Russian army.
It was the first time in more than two years that the airport received passengers. The rest of the group arrived by bus. Some of the freed civilians had been captured before the Russian invasion when Moscow illegally annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.
Among those released was Nariman Dzhelyal, deputy head of the Mejlis, a representative body of the Crimean Tatars which was transferred to Kyiv after Russia’s capture of the peninsula.
He was taken from Crimea, where he had been living despite the annexation, a year before the war. “I was in captivity, where many Ukrainians are,” he said. “We cannot leave them there, because the conditions there, both psychological and physical, are very frightening.”
In the airport’s main hall, where pre-war advertisements still hang, former prisoners wrapped in blue and yellow flags reunited with their families and called on those who could not be there.
For some, the separation lasted for many years. “I really want to hug you. I will be with you soon, mom,” Isabella Pekh, the daughter of the released art historian Olena Pekh, said in a video call. “I am very sorry that I could not meet you.”
For almost six years, Isabella Pekh spoke at international conferences and appealed to foreign ambassadors to help free her mother, detained in the occupied part of the Donetsk region.
Finally, her efforts were heard. “It was six years of hell that words cannot describe. But I knew that I had my homeland, that I had people who loved me, I had my daughter,” Olena Pekh said.
Two priests were also among those who returned on Friday. One of them, Bohdan Heleta, was arrested in 2022 at his church in the occupied city of Berdyansk, Zaporizhzhia region. According to the Ukrainian Coordination Center for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, 3,310 Ukrainians have already been released from Russian captivity. But several thousand people, civilians and military personnel, remain imprisoned.
