Released from Russian captivity, Bohdan Kovalchuk: the story of a 17-year-old hostage

During the prisoner exchange, civilian hostage Bohdan Kovalchuk was released, who was kidnapped back in 2016 when he was only 17 years old. His grandmother Tatyana Hots reported that he had already called and said: 'Grandma, I'm coming home.' She plans to travel to Kyiv to meet Bohdan. It is stated that Kovalchuk tried to leave the occupied Yasynuvata to visit his grandmother in Dzerzhinsk (now Toretsk) to finish his studies at the vocational school and obtain a Ukrainian diploma, but he was detained at a checkpoint. The occupiers accused him of collaborating with the SBU, blowing up vehicles and premises on the territory of 'DPR police.' At the end of 2018, he was sentenced to 10 years and was sent to a penal colony in Torez. As part of the exchange, during which 84 citizens of Ukraine returned, including military personnel and civilians, civilian and military Ukrainians who were detained in temporarily occupied territories even before the full-scale invasion and sentenced to long prison terms were freed. Among those released was a colonel, a border guard from the Mariupol garrison, who had been fighting since 2014. Wounded in battle, he continued to defend Ukraine. The State Border Guard Service showed the first footage of the return of Ukrainians home, in one of which a woman, released from captivity after six years of imprisonment, said that she had not seen her children for a long time.