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“Grandma, I’m Coming Home”: Bohdan Kovalchuk Released After 9 Years in Russian Captivity
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![Photo of Cyril Barabaltchouk]( "Photo of Cyril Barabaltchouk")
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In the latest prisoner exchange, Bohdan Kovalchuk, a civilian who was captured by the Russian army in 2016 when he was just 17 years old, is returning to Ukraine after 9 years of Russian captivity, Hromadske reports.
His grandmother, Tetiana Hots, confirmed the news to Hromadske, sharing that Bohdan had already called her. “Grandma, I’m coming home,” he told her. Tetiana is now planning to travel to Kyiv to meet him.
In June of this year, Hromadske shared the story of Bohdan and several other civilian hostages. Bohdan had been attempting to leave the occupied city of Yasynuvata to visit his grandmother in what was then Dzerzhynsk (now Toretsk), with hopes of finishing his studies at a vocational school and receiving a Ukrainian diploma. He was detained at a checkpoint.
The Russians accused him of collaborating with the SBU (Ukrainian Security Service), and involvement in car bombings and the destruction of a “DPR police” building. In 2018, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison and sent to the Torez correctional facility under Russian control.
Overall, on August 14, Ukraine carried out its 67th prisoner exchange, securing the release of 84 citizens—33 military personnel and 51 civilians—from Russian captivity, the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War reported.
This exchange was unique in that it brought home Ukrainians who had been detained in the temporarily occupied territories even before the all allstart of the full-scale invasion and sentenced by occupation “courts” to lengthy prison terms of 10 to 18 years. One of the freed had endured 4,013 days in captivity, having been taken prisoner in the Donetsk region back in 2014.
Earlier, it was reported that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that Ukraine and Russia reached a preliminary agreement to exchange 1,200 prisoners of war, Zelenskyy wrote on X.
