Air crash increases tension between Russia and Ukraine 2:05

(CNN) --

Russia and Ukraine exchanged hundreds of prisoners of war, in the first such exchange since the deadly incident involving a Russian military plane that Moscow said was carrying 65 captured Ukrainian servicemen.

President Volodymyr Zelensky declared that 207 Ukrainian servicemen had been returned on Wednesday, while the Russian Defense Ministry said it had received 195 Russian servicemen.

"Ours are at home. 207 boys," Zelensky said, adding that almost half of the returnees were "defenders of Mariupol," the southern Ukrainian city that was brutally besieged in the first weeks of the war.

Zelensky stated that there have already been 50 prisoner swaps since Russia launched its full-scale invasion almost two years ago, thanks to which Ukraine has brought home 3,035 soldiers.

"We will do everything possible to return each and every one of them. We have not forgotten anyone. We are looking for each and every name," he said.

Wednesday's exchange was the first since the mysterious crash of a Russian IL-76 plane on January 24 in Russia's Belgorod region, neighboring eastern Ukraine.

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Moscow claimed the plane was carrying dozens of Ukrainian prisoners of war, while Kyiv said it was carrying Russian missiles to be used in new attacks on Ukraine.

Both sides acknowledged that a prisoner exchange had been planned for the day of the crash, but Andriy Yusov, a spokesman for Ukraine's Defense Intelligence (DI), told CNN that Ukraine had not received notification that the prisoners would be airlifted. to the region, rather than by road or rail.

Russia initially presented no visual evidence to support its claims that the soldiers had died in the crash.

Ukraine later stated that it had intelligence suggesting that only five bodies had been transported from the crash site to a mortuary in Belgorod, a figure Yusov said matched the number of crew members on the plane. .

Several Ukrainian officials accused Russia of falsely suggesting that Ukraine had inadvertently killed dozens of its own soldiers.

Among the 207 released soldiers are none of the 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war included in the list published by the Russian media of those presumed dead in the IL-76 plane crash, Petro Yatsenko, representative of the Ukrainian center, told CNN. coordination for the treatment of prisoners of war.

Kyiv officials said last Friday that the names of the 65 prisoners of war on the Russian list matched the list of prisoners of war scheduled to be returned to Ukraine as part of the exchange that was to take place on the day of the accident.

However, the head of the Ukrainian intelligence services, Kyrylo Budanov, stated that there was still no reliable information about who could have been on board the downed Russian plane.

Following Wednesday's prisoner exchange, President Vladimir Putin claimed that the IL-76 aircraft had been shot down by a US Patriot missile system.

"The plane was shot down - this has already been established with certainty - by the American Patriot system. This has already been established by examination," Putin said at a meeting focused on his election campaign.

He called on international authorities to carry out their own investigations.

kyiv has not claimed responsibility for the downing of the plane.

Although the Il-76 aircraft would have been within range of a Patriot deployed near the northern Ukrainian border, Ukraine has consistently stated that it will not use missiles donated by the West beyond its own internationally recognized territory.

Putin insisted that Russia would not stop the prisoner exchange despite the plane crash.

"We have to pick up our own," he said.

"We have thousands, they [the Ukrainians] have several dozen, maybe hundreds [of prisoners of war]. But we will still pick up our guys if the Ukrainian side is ready for it, and they give a signal that they are ready."

Neither Ukraine nor Russia's statements on Wednesday's prisoner exchange mentioned the accident.

Zelensky's office chief Andriy Yermak said the swap was "the second major exchange after a long pause."

Along with the returning Mariupol defenders, he said, there were also "soldiers who were in the Azovstal, Zmiinyi Snake Island, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Luhansk, Kherson and Sumy directions."

The Russian Defense Ministry stated that the released Russian soldiers would be flown on military transport planes to Moscow for treatment and rehabilitation.

CNN's Svitlana Vlasova and Mariya Knight contributed to this report.

Russian war in Ukraine