Natalia Vlasova, who’d been arrested in 2019, in Donetsk, was especially fixated on the idea of an obmin. She was forty-three, and among the longest-held Ukrainian civilian prisoners in Russian custody. Her only child, a daughter, was four years old when Vlasova was detained for allegedly taking part in an assassination plot. The little food they had in the cell—cookies and tea, a few sticks of salami—was left behind for the others. Vlasova, who during her years in Russian detention had watched countless times as others were freed and she was left behind, wept.