ZYTHI WORLD ANALYSIS

The Wound That Never Healed For Russia, the story doesn’t start in 2022. It starts in 1991, when the Soviet Union fell apart. And for a lot of Russians, that wasn’t liberation. It was humiliation. An empire that had beaten Napoleon and Hitler, that had put the first man in space, suddenly collapsed. Fifteen republics went their own way. Russia lost a quarter of its territory, half its population, and its status as a superpower. Ukraine wasn’t just another republic. It was the heartland. Kyivan Rus is where Russian civilization began. Crimea was Russian for centuries. Sevastopol was the home of the Black Sea Fleet. The idea that Ukraine would just… leave? That was hard for a lot of Russians to swallow. Putin called it the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. He meant it. But for a while, Moscow tried to make it work. They signed treaties. They recognized Ukraine’s borders. They even gave up their nuclear weapons in exchange for a promise—the Budapest Memorandum—that Ru...

Ukraine and Russia made the biggest prisoner swap since the start of Russia's all-out invasion in February 2022 on May 23, 2025, representing a brief moment of concord between warring parties. In the exchange, 1,000 prisoners of war from both sides were released as negotiations held in Istanbul last week saw the two sides reach an agreement. While the exchange provides some hope for families and a step in the direction of de-escalation, it also highlights the profound divisions that have been driving the conflict thus far. A closer examination of this historic exchange and its wider implications follows. A Long-Awaited Exchange The prisoner exchange, billed by Ukrainian officials as the most important since hostilities started, was the result of hard negotiations brokered by Turkey. The negotiations, conducted on May 16 in a palace from the Ottoman era located on the shores of the Bosphorus, were the first face-to-face encounter between Ukrainian and Russian delegations since March...