Russia and Ukraine have exchanged 84 prisoners, both sides said, the latest in a series of swaps that has seen hundreds of POWs released so far this year.
This latest one came on the eve of a high-level summit between Russian President Vladimir Putin and US counterpart Donald Trump in Alaska on Friday.
The Russian defence ministry said on Telegram that the United Arab Emirates had mediated the exchange and that the released Russian personnel were receiving "psychological and medical assistance".
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on social media that among the exchanged prisoners were "both military personnel and civilians," some of whom had been "held by the Russians since 2014, 2016, and 2017".
He said "defenders of Mariupol" were also part of the swap, referring to a Ukrainian port city that fell to Russian forces in 2022 following a nearly three-month siege.
Mr Zelensky shared pictures of Ukrainian soldiers, smiling and draped in blue-and-yellow national flags.
He said "there will be more exchanges" of prisoners.
Large-scale prisoner exchanges were the only tangible result of three rounds of peace talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Istanbul between May and July.
In their latest round of talks last month, Russia and Ukraine agreed to exchange 1,200 prisoners of war each.
A Russian negotiator said that Moscow had also offered to hand Kyiv the bodies of 3,000 killed soldiers.
Russia says it struck Ukrainian missile plants
Meanwhile, Russia's defence ministry has said that its forces struck a number of Ukrainian missile plants, weapons design bureaus and rocket fuel productions enterprises with missiles and drones in July.
Russian forces destroyed a number of Western missile defence systems - including Patriot launchers and fire control radar in the Dnipropetrovsk and Sumy regions - that had been deployed to defend the plants, the ministry said.
"An attempt by the Kyiv regime, together with its Western partners, to organise the production of missiles to carry out attacks deep into the territory of the Russian Federation was thwarted," the ministry said.
It comes as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer will be joined by the Ukrainian president at Downing Street this morning, as Europe braces for the outcome of Mr Trump's face-to-face discussions with his Russian counterpart tomorrow.
