Lydia has come for her son Andriy, also a defender of Mariupol. She heard this morning that she was on the list. Before that, she only knew that he was sentenced to 25 years in prison in Russia.
She hugs other people waiting behind the bar. They know each other from meetings of relatives of prisoners of war. They held each other.
Tatyana Afisova, the mother of Mariupol officer Pavel Afisov, is also there. “He doesn’t know we’re here,” she says. But she also says, “I still can’t believe he’s standing here like this.”
Night is falling, the bus should have been there a long time ago. “All the other exchanges took place in daylight,” says one woman in despair. A police spokesman arrives and says that the exchange due to take place at the Ukraine-Belarus border has been postponed.