Since his release from a Russian prison, Dmytro Khyliuk has barely been off the phone.

The Ukrainian journalist was detained by Russian forces in the first days of their full-scale invasion. Three and a half years later he's been released in a prisoner swap, one of eight civilians freed in a surprise move.

While Russia and Ukraine have swapped military prisoners of war before, it is very rare for Russia to release Ukrainian civilians.

Dmytro has been catching up frantically on all he's missed. But he's also phoning the families of every Ukrainian he met in captivity: he memorised all their names and each detail.

He knows that for some, his call may be the first confirmation that their relative is alive.

The welcome home

There were celebrations here last month when Dmytro was returned from Russia in a group of 146 Ukrainians.

A crowd came out waving blue and yellow national flags, cheering as the buses carrying the freed men passed hooting their horns.

Most on board were soldiers with sunken cheeks, emaciated after their years behind bars.

Officials won't say exactly how they got the eight Ukrainian civilians back in the same exchange, only that it involved sending back in return people Russia was interested in.

Constant cruelty

We met Dmytro shortly after his release as he recuperated at a Kyiv hospital.

The details he shared of his captivity are chilling.

They grabbed us and literally dragged us to the prison and on the way they beat us with rubber batons shouting things like, 'How many people have you killed?' he said, describing his transfer to Russia.

He was held in multiple facilities and his account chimes with many others we've heard over the years.

Sometimes they'd let the guard dog off its leash so that it could bite us. The cruelty was really shocking and it was constant.

The journalist was never charged with any crime.

His parents' fear

The journalist's family home is a world away from all that, in the pretty village of Kozarovychi just outside Kyiv.

It feels peaceful, apart from the air raids, with gardens full of poultry, blackberry bushes and fruit trees.

But the back wall of Dmytro's house still has chunks torn out of it by shrapnel and the lawn was only just repaired where Russian troops had parked a tank.

In 2022, right at the start of their full-scale invasion when the Russians were advancing on Kyiv, they took over the village.

The couple now knows that they were held in a basement beneath the local warehouses where the Russians had made their base.

Ukraine's missing

Other families have had no news at all.

Across Ukraine, officials say more than 16,000 civilians are currently missing. So far, they've only located a fraction of them in Russian prisons.

Moscow doesn't publish lists because detaining civilians with no cause is illegal. But that makes getting them back extremely complicated.

Forty-three men are still being held from the area around Dmytro's village alone.