This month, the Ukrainian journalist Victoriia Roshchyna was finally laid to rest in a cemetery in Kyiv. She had disappeared in August 2023 while investigating abuses by Russian forces in occupied areas of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region. After more than a year in Russian custody, she was to be released as part of a prisoner swap between Kyiv and Moscow. But she died before the exchange took place. Russian authorities eventually repatriated her body, which showed signs of torture.

Last October, when news broke of Roshchyna’s death, Donald Trump was running for U.S. president and repeatedly promising that if elected, he would end Russia’s war against Ukraine “in one day.” But the war grinds on, with Russian forces intensifying attacks across the frontline and ramping up long-range strikes on Ukrainian cities. Expectations are low that Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin today in Alaska will resolve the many important questions that the warring parties must iron out, such as security guarantees for Ukraine and the future of the occupied territories.

But the many thousands of Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) and captured civilians held in the occupied territories and in Russia proper, as well as the hundreds of Ukrainian children put up for adoption after they were deported to Russia, cannot wait for a negotiated end to the armed conflict that could take years to materialize. Nor can the scores of Russian nationals imprisoned for their antiwar stance or actions. Every day that Ukrainians and Russian political prisoners remain in custody comes with a risk that they will share Roshchyna’s fate.

Releasing war captives may be the one thing that all parties can quickly agree on. In June, Putin’s spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, noted the importance of Russian-Ukrainian negotiations from a “humanitarian perspective” and spoke of the hundreds of captured Russian soldiers who were able to “return home” following a prisoner swap that Kyiv and Moscow agreed to during negotiations in Istanbul. Throughout the spring and summer, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky repeatedly declared that “bringing home” Ukrainian captives was “a top priority” for his government. Kyiv’s backers share this concern. The European Union and the Council of Europe have strongly emphasized the need for Moscow to release Ukrainian detainees. So has the United States, which, in a joint statement with Ukraine published in March, demanded that the Kremlin prioritize “the exchange of prisoners of war, the release of civilian detainees, and the return of deported Ukrainian children.” Qatar, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have all been involved in mediating prisoner swaps and in efforts to secure the repatriation of Ukrainian children.

The U.S. administration must now emphasize the need to release and repatriate wartime detainees in its negotiations with Moscow. This is not just an idealistic goal. Because an agreement for both sides to free civilian detainees and exchange POWs is relatively low-hanging fruit in diplomacy with the Kremlin, securing it could help smooth the way for talks over more vexing issues. And in the meantime, a deal could meaningfully reduce the human suffering this war inflicts daily. It is too late to save Roshchyna, who was just 27 years old when she died in Russian detention. But thousands of war captives can still come home.

The exact number of POWs held by Russia and Ukraine and civilian detainees held by Russia is unknown, but according to estimates by both Russian and Ukrainian officials, the number is in the thousands. In the past 12 months, hundreds of POWs have been released in exchanges. In talks in Istanbul in May, Kyiv and Moscow agreed to the first large-scale prisoner swap of the war: 1,000 from each side. (Roughly every eighth prisoner........

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