Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service.

We're coming to you live from our studio in central London.

I'm Liz Doucette.

And we start in Ukraine, in their brutal war, a war in which there are occasional moments of joy, when prisoners finally come

home, when families rejoice. The latest and the largest exchange of Russian and Ukrainian

prisoners of war has now been underway. A total of 2,000 people could be allowed to return to

their homes over three days. It was the only concrete result to emerge from

the recent face-to-face talks between Russian and Ukrainian delegations in Istanbul.

What's it like to be there to finally see prisoners coming home? Petro Yatsenko is with the Ukrainian

coordination headquarters for the treatment of prisoners of war.

It's fascinating feelings, and every time it brings a lot of energy to every one of us,

because these people, Ukrainians, was in Russian captivity almost for two or even three years.

Of course, they are very happy happy and it's a very big achievement

for us and a lot of work, a very big team of the coordination headquarters. In the emotion, though,

some worry about the physical condition of the prisoners and, of course, their own emotional state?

Our released former prisoners of war have no sufficient food.

They have no medical care in Russian captivity.

And no one representative of the international Red Cross can visit them to check their health condition and conditions for their life.

And of course, they experience in everyday tortures.

They need a very long period of rehabilitation and reintegration in Ukrainian society

because they were isolated from any outer information and they were brainwashed by Russian propaganda too.

I know you want to guard the privacy of the prisoners, but can you share with us any of the details about what it was like in captivity, where they were kept, how many to a cell, what kind of physical abuse torture they endured?

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