This just in this morning.
Time magazine has announced
the 2022 person of the year
who had the greatest influence
on the events that you saw play out.
Let's see what
some of the finalists were.
Elon Musk.
Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Protesters in Iran.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
Congresswoman Liz Cheney.
But the winner is Ukraine's
President Zelensky,
now battling his 10th month of war
against the Russians
ever since Putin invaded his country.
And speaking of Ukraine's military,
this morning, says that at least
two people are dead.
Several have been wounded
after heavy
Russian shelling targeted
the civilian areas of the Donetsk
and Harrison region.
Meantime, in the midst of the fighting,
there is some good news
for families ahead of the holidays.
Ukrainian soldiers
returning home
in a big prisoner exchange.
CNN's Will Ripley
has the exclusive reporting from Kiev.
At an undisclosed location
near the Russian border.
Two busses
arrive with 60 Ukrainian soldiers,
prisoners of war
just released in a P.O.W.
swap with Russia.
Two women. 58 men.
Their first minutes of freedom,
this marine tells me about his four year
old daughter to my teenage daughter.
It's so emotional, he says.
I can't
wait to tell her I love her
and that I've missed her so much.
Some are parents, others grandparents.
Most defenders of Mariupol,
the southern Ukrainian port city
that fell to the Russians in May
and some delivery by all of us
from Mariupol worries so much, he says.
We lost the city.
We couldn't fight them off.
We don't know
how people will react to us.
You'll get a hero's welcome, of course,
as we go inside,
they each get a cell phone
the first time they've called
their families in months.
I cook. Mama. Papa. How's Mom?
How's Dad? He asks. Are they alive?
Their
bodies bear the scars
of months of captivity.
Now, he didn't have any
medical treatment, he says.
It's been eight days
since he's had a shower.
A lot of these guys
have physical injuries, scars.
But the emotional scars,
the mental scars
from this kind of hellish ordeal
are going to take even longer.
To heal.
One of the two rescue women,
a radio intelligence operator,
describes months of psychological torture
lies that half of Ukraine was now part
of Russia brainwashing, forced to read
Russian poetry, sing Russian songs,
pledge loyalty, to mother Russia
as a kid.
I wondered, when will this be over?
She says. And now you're here.
Sorry for my tears giving you so much
for this former P.O.W.
There are no tears left.
Her six year
old daughter is still in
occupied Mariupol.
She has no way to contact her
or her husband, a sailor.
They surrender on the same day.
How does it feel to be out
and know that your husband
still still there, still in Russia,
which can see no reason
why I worry so much about him, she says.
They torture men much more than women.
She's not ready to talk about
how she was physically treated.
She, like everyone
here, just wants to see
family wants to go home.
For most from devastated
and occupied Mariupol
going home is not an option
for
one of the first things they did
was seeing the Ukrainian anthem
that you heard the beginning of there.
Because in Russia every day
they were forced to wake up at 6 a.m.
to the Russian anthem
and they said all they wanted to do
is be back on their home soil.
They are now back on their home soil.
But it is a long road ahead.
They don't get to go directly home.
One because many of their homes
have been destroyed.
In Mariupol,
but also they need to go through
a rehabilitation program
to try to transition back to normal life.
And after everything,
all the horrific things they experienced
and they've been through.
It'll only be a very tough recovery for
these men and women.
Yeah, it's hard to see
what a normal life is like for them.
Will Ripley.
Thank you, Don.
Poppy, just hearing the stories
of those people
who are
released from being prisoners of war,
but now
they're still separated
from their families.
They're still trying to figure out
what life looks like now.
And you're so right, there is no normalcy
after that.