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LeMonde

an hour ago

• LeMonde

Russia and Ukraine swap more prisoners after Istanbul talks

Russia and Ukraine exchanged more captured soldiers on Friday, June 20, the latest in a series of prisoner swaps agreed at peace talks in Istanbul earlier this month. The negotiations failed to make progress towards a ceasefire but both countries agreed to free more than 1,000 prisoners of war from each side – all wounded, ill or under 25 years old. "A group of Russian servicemen was returned from the territory controlled by the Kyiv regime. In exchange, a group of Ukrainian prisoners of war was handed over," Russia's defense ministry said in a statement. An AFP reporter saw freed Ukrainian prisoners of war being greeted by tearful relatives after stepping off a bus. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky said most of the Ukrainians freed in the swap had been in Russian captivity "for over two years." Neither side said how many soldiers had been freed in Friday's swap. Moscow posted a video of Russian soldiers in military fatigues, chanting "Russia, Russia" with Russian flags draped over them. Zelensky shared images of Ukrainian soldiers, with shaved heads and in the blue-and-yellow national flag, weeping as they called relatives. The two sides have carried out dozens of such exchanges since Russia invaded in 2022 in one of the only areas of dialogue between Moscow and Kyiv. Two rounds of peace talks in Istanbul have failed to result in a pause to the fighting. Russia has rejected calls for an unconditional ceasefire, vowing to press on with its three-year invasion. It is demanding Kyiv cede more territory and give up on Western military support as a precondition to a truce.

France 24

6 hours ago

• France 24

Ukraine slams Putin's 'disdain' for peace process after he says 'whole of Ukraine' belongs to Russia

Ukraine said Friday that Russian President Vladimir Putin had shown "disdain" for the peace process by suggesting Moscow might seize more Ukrainian territory, including the northeastern city of Sumy. "Putin's cynical statements demonstrate complete disdain for US peace efforts ... The only way to force Russia into peace is to deprive it of its sense of impunity," Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga said in a post on X. Putin on Friday told the St Petersburg International Economic Forum that Russians and Ukrainians were one people, "and in that sense the whole of Ukraine is ours". He cautioned that advancing Russian forces could take the Ukrainian city of Sumy as part of a bid to carve out a buffer zone along the border. Putin, who ordered troops into Ukraine in 2022 after eight years of fighting in eastern Ukraine, also said he was not seeking the capitulation of Ukraine or denying Ukraine's sovereignty, but that Ukraine had to be neutral. Russia currently controls about a fifth of Ukraine, including Crimea, more than 99% of the Luhansk region, over 70% of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and fragments of the Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions. Kyiv and its Western allies say Moscow's claims to four Ukrainian regions and Crimea are illegal, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly rejected the notion that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. He has also said that Putin's terms for peace are akin to capitulation. Putin said on Friday he was not questioning Ukraine's independence or its people's striving for sovereignty, but he underscored that when Ukraine declared independence as the Soviet Union fell in 1991 it had also declared its neutrality. Putin said Moscow wanted Ukraine to accept the reality on the ground if there was to be a chance of peace – Russia's shorthand for the reality of Russia's control over a chunk of Ukrainian territory bigger than the US state of Virginia. "We have a saying, or a parable," Putin said. "Where the foot of a Russian soldier steps, that is ours."

France 24

9 hours ago

• France 24

Putin says recession in Russia 'must not be allowed to happen'

Economists have warned for months of a slowdown in the Russian economy, with the country posting its slowest quarterly expansion in two years for the first quarter of 2025. The Kremlin has said this was to be expected after two years of rapid growth as it ramped up military expenditure to fund the Ukraine campaign, but officials including the country's economy minister have raised alarm about possible pain ahead. "Some specialists and experts are pointing to the risks of stagnation and even a recession," Putin told attendees at Russia's flagship economic forum in Saint Petersburg. "This must not be allowed to happen under any circumstances," he said. "We need to pursue a competent, well-thought-out budgetary, tax and monetary policy," he added. The Russian economy grew in 2023 and 2024 despite the West's sweeping sanctions, with massive state spending on the military powering a robust expansion. But analysts have long warned that heavy public investment in the defence industry is no longer enough to keep Russia's economy growing and does not reflect a real increase in productivity. At his address to the forum on Friday, Putin was upbeat about Russia's economic prospects and denied the economy was being driven solely by the defence and energy industries. "Yes, of course, the defence industry played its part in this regard, but so did the financial and IT industries," he said. He said the economy needed "balanced growth" and called on officials to keep a "close eye on all indicators of the health of our industries, companies and even individual enterprises." © 2025 AFP