A few hours before the buses were expected to pull up carrying more than 300 Ukrainian soldiers who had just been released from Russian prison, dozens of women arrived clutching photos and holding posters in a desperate bid for information.
Iryna Mylto, 28, had three photos of her father, Serhii Hrom, 50, who had been captured and imprisoned in Russia for nearly a year and a half.
He wasn’t on the list of prisoners who were going to be exchanged on Saturday, but like the others who crowded the lawns and sidewalk, she was hoping that some of the newly freed soldiers might recognize her dad.
Perhaps they fought alongside him or maybe recognized him from a cell in prison.
“I just hope that someone will say he is OK, that he is alive and healthy,” Mylto told a CBCÂ News crew in the Chernihiv region of northern Ukraine on Saturday.
“I am always afraid of getting bad news.”
Her father, who previously worked as a security guard before being conscripted into the army, had gone missing while fighting near Kupiansk, in the Kharkiv region, in November 2023.
A month later, the family discovered he had been taken prisoner, after someone forwarded them a video from a Russian social media channel that showed Hrom in custody and complaining that he was having trouble seeing.
That was the only thing her family knew about her father, until her phone suddenly rang while waiting for the buses to arrive on Saturday.
On the other line was a Ukrainian official who said they had just learned that Hrom had been released in the latest group and was on one of the buses on the way to a hospital.
Mylto and her young sister, Olena Kachaeva, 24, began to cry tears of joy and then excitedly called their mother, Tatiana Hrom.
She hadn’t come with them that morning to try and canvas for information, but she raced toward the rendezvous point when she was told about the sudden, surprise reunion.
“It’s hard to believe,” Mylto said. “We were just standing here a minute ago hoping for some information, and now we get this message!”
Hundreds of PoWs exchanged
Her father was among the 307 Ukrainian soldiers released on Saturday in exchange for the same number of Russian soldiers. Both countries agreed to free 1,000 prisoners of war as part of direct talks in Turkey last week.
Saturday’s exchange followed the release of nearly 800 PoWs on Friday.
While Russia and Ukraine have agreed to several prisoner swaps since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbour in February 2022, this exchange was the largest so far.
Russia and Ukraine each exchanged 307 of their service personnel on Saturday on the second day of a prisoner exchange that, when completed, is set to be the largest such swap in the three-year war between the two countries.
It is believed that each side has thousands of prisoners of war, but neither country discloses the exact figures.
Media organizations reporting in Ukraine are given access to cover the return of the soldiers but must agree to conditions set by the Ukrainian military. They include not identifying exact locations and avoiding any questions related to conditions and treatment, over fears they could be traumatizing.
There have been numerous reports of torture in Russian prisons, and in 2024, a United Nations commission of inquiry found evidence that torture was commonly used against Ukrainian civilians and soldiers.Â
‘Thank God he returned’
As Mylto waited for the soldiers to arrive, she reflected on how her father’s absence had put a hole in their tight-knit family. After he was conscripted and sent to the front, they were unable to stay in contact with him.
After he was taken prisoner, she told her oldest daughter that Grandpa was on the road for work and wouldn’t be able to message them.
Mylto said she struggles to think what he has been through and instead wants to focus on how she can support him in his recovery.
When the buses pulled up, a group of soldiers wrapped in Ukrainian flags stepped off to a crowd of cheers.
Mylto didn’t see her father, so she and her sister and mother rushed to the entrance of the hospital where he was supposed to be taken and waited outside for news.
A doctor inside told them to go around the corner and look up.
Her father was in a window, smiling and waving down from a hospital room. He was pale and very thin, but he gave his daughters and wife a thumbs up.
“Thank God he returned,” Mylto said, wiping away tears. “We don’t know what happened to him there, but we will manage it.”
‘My daughter does not know her father’
As her family waited to be let into the hospital for a proper reunion, soldiers were led in one by one past a line of people, mostly women. They pushed photos forward and shouted out names hoping someone would recognize something.
In the crowd was 21-year-old Veronika Kulakova, whose partner, Ivan Kukovitskiy, has never met their five-month-old daughter.
He was captured seven months ago. At a previous prisoner release, she had spoken to two soldiers who believed they saw him in a Russian hospital.
Kulakova said she has no other information and is desperately waiting for a call to hear that he, too, will one day be released.
“I am very sorry that my daughter does not know her father. I often show her his photo so that when he returns, she understands that it’s him.”
