Two Americans held by Russian-backed forces for more than three months returned to US soil Friday afternoon.   

  Americans Alexander John-Robert Drueke and Andy Tai Ngoc Huynh arrived in New York after being released earlier this week in a prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine brokered by Saudi Arabia.  Their families said they believe the men are in good health.   

  “We know they’re talking, breathing, walking and sounding like themselves,” Darla Black, the mother of Huynh’s fiancee, told CNN on Friday.   

  The two men were captured in June while fighting for Ukraine in a battle near Kharkiv.  Their pro-Russian captors, the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), are a self-proclaimed Russian-backed republic that has ruled a breakaway part of Ukraine’s Donetsk region since 2014.   

  The families of Drueke and Huynh, CNN previously reported, had not spoken to the Alabama men during their months-long incarceration until they received unexpected phone calls from the US embassy in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday.   

  “I have your son standing right next to me,” a woman from the American embassy in Saudi Arabia recalled Bani Druke telling her.   

  The families were unaware that a prisoner exchange was in the works.   

  “My mind couldn’t understand it because there was no warning.  It just came out of the blue,” Drueke’s mother told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.   

  Huynh’s fiancé, Joy Black, told CNN’s Erin Burnett that Huynh asked for spaghetti with meat — a meal he’s been craving since he was in Ukraine — once he gets back to Alabama.   

  Even after their capture, their families say the men had said they had no regrets about going to fight the Ukrainians.   

  “Alex told me unequivocally no, I have no regrets,” his aunt, Diana Shaw, told CNN.  “They really want the world to understand that Ukraine needs our support.  They need the support of all democratic nations.  It takes democracies to unite and push back against (Russian President Vladimir) Putin.”   

  Four Russian-held regions began voting on Friday in referendums on joining Russia, according to their separatist leaders, in a move that raises the stakes of Moscow’s invasion.  The referendums, which are illegal under international law and dismissed as a fraud by Western governments and Kyiv, could pave the way for Russian annexation of the territories, allowing Moscow to brand the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive as an attack on itself. Russia.   

  President Joe Biden said Friday that the United States will never recognize Russia’s referendums in the occupied parts of Ukraine.   

  “The United States will never recognize Ukrainian territory as anything other than part of Ukraine.  “Russia’s referendums are a fraud – a false pretext to try to annex parts of Ukraine by force in flagrant violation of international law, including the United Nations Charter,” Biden said in a statement.