Sarah Rainsford

This is a prisoner swap that we understood was coming and is now being confirmed.

The U.S.

envoy, Steve Witkoff, as you mentioned, has said that a total of 314 prisoners will be exchanged, pretty much half and half, as we understand, between Russia and Ukraine.

It's not entirely clear just yet whether those are all soldiers who are prisoners of war, if it possibly includes some civilian prisoners, too, to be returned from Russian jails.

But certainly it's significant in the sense it's the first prisoner swap that's been arranged since last August, the end of last August, when I was here in Kiev.

And we spoke to some of the civilian prisoners who were released then, and they described their really very, very difficult previous years in Russian jails in particular.

So that's a big deal for the families, of course, and it's a big deal for Ukraine.

But it's part of a broader process of talks, which at this point don't appear to be yielding any major breakthroughs, particularly, of course, on that massively sensitive issue.

Yeah, it kind of feels like we've been here before.

We've definitely been here before because this is the whole point of this war right now, which is that Russia is pushing with all the pressure it can possibly bring to bear, including multiple drone strikes and missile strikes on Ukraine, but also US diplomatic pressure on Ukraine to basically give in.

to Russia's big demand.

And that is that they want that sort of 20% remaining of the Donbass, which the Russians haven't taken on the battlefield.

They want that to be part of any peace deal.

And the Russian side is being particularly intransigent.

We've heard from the Kremlin saying that the fight, the battle will continue until Ukraine makes what Dmitry Peskov, who's Vladimir Putin's spokesman, said was the right decisions.

But we've also heard from President Zelensky here in Ukraine who said...

Russia is not winning on the battlefield.

And if it wants that land through military action, it will take Russia two years at the current rate to take that territory.

And it would cost, he said, 800,000 more dead soldiers.

So he's making the point that Russia's pressure is one thing in words, but in reality on the ground, although there is progress by Russia moving forward extremely, extremely slowly, it's costing hugely.