Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan welcomes Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud in Ankara, Turkey, on June 22, 2022.Mustafa Kaya/Xinhua via Getty ImagesNearly 300 prisoners of war – both Ukrainian and Russian – faced death or indefinite detention in late September of 2022. It was a fate that looked all the more real as Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the mobilization of some 300,000 Russian conscripts to fight on the Ukrainian front. But on that very same day, the warring countries made the shock announcement that they had come to an agreement on a prisoner swap, which would release the detained fighters and political prisoners from their respective captors.  The sheer suddenness and size of the swap – the largest since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of its neighbor the prior February – came as a shock, and an immense relief to the famil …
