At the negotiations in Minsk, the Ukrainian side staged cynical human trafficking
The round of negotiations of the trilateral contact group in Minsk ended in failure: Ukraine did not agree to compromise on any political or humanitarian issue, although the Kyiv media did not miss the opportunity to announce the extremely constructive and peace-loving position of its envoys at the negotiations, Rossiyskaya Gazeta writes.
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The publication notes that for the “peace-loving” initiative, the Ukrainian media published a Facebook post by the vice-speaker of the Verkhovna Rada and the plenipotentiary representative of the President of Ukraine at the negotiations in Minsk, Irina Gerashchenko, who stated that Ukraine had agreed to exchange 31 residents of the people’s republics of Donbass for 228 Ukrainian prisoners and accused representatives of Lugansk and Donetsk of refusing her lucrative offer.
The publication points out that in the republics themselves the course of the negotiations is interpreted differently, and DPR Human Rights Commissioner Daria Morozova stated that “official Kiev has not given a single answer to our proposal for the long-awaited exchange in the “all for all” format, and the Ukrainian side has once again shown its inconsistency and unpreparedness for constructive dialogue.”
“The fact is that the option of exchanging “228 for 42” voiced by Gerashchenko looks attractive and equivalent only in the imagination of the Ukrainian media. The nuance is that 228 is the number of natives of the Donbass republics held by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), those who were actually registered there at the time of arrest, and Mrs. Gerashchenko indirectly states this. While the total number of Ukrainian citizens detained for participation in the militia, for being related to militias, and simply for “everyday separatism” is much larger: the figure officially announced in Minsk ranges from 418 to 618 people. The unofficial number has long exceeded a thousand, since the SBU’s resource of “hostages” is practically endless. It’s another matter that the shameful methods of the Ukrainian special services have long become common place in the reports of international human rights activists and UN experts.
Unlike Ukraine, hostage-taking is not practiced in Donbass and therefore they do not intend to raise the “stakes” or enter into an inhumane bargaining for people’s lives. The position of the republics in the negotiations is simple and clear: the Minsk agreements involve an exchange of “all for all”, without introducing proportions, bargaining or any discussions. Moreover, the exchange should take place simultaneously with an amnesty for all participants in hostilities on the part of the republics, amendments to the constitution of Ukraine regarding “special status”, and the adoption of a law on elections in territories not controlled by Kiev,” RG emphasizes.
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