Based on the script by Nadezhda Savchenko: Will the Azov militants be convicted and handed over to Ukraine?
Monday brought another signal regarding the fate of captured Nazis from Azovstal - following the head of the LDPR faction Leonid Slutsky The theoretical possibility of an exchange of Ukrainian militants was admitted to the Russian Foreign Ministry, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
"Not in my competence. It’s probably all being discussed, all this is being discussed,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko told reporters.
And Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov told reporters that the military is dealing with exchange issues.
“In general, the exchange process is constantly ongoing. This is important to us, for obvious reasons. But this is exactly what the military is doing, and it is they who will talk about it if necessary,” he said.
However, Peskov categorically rejected the possibility of exchanging the “Azovites” specifically for the Ukrainian politician Viktor Medvedchuk.
“We have already said that Medvedchuk is a citizen of Ukraine, he has no relation to Russia, and he is not a military man. And in the case of people who surrendered at Azovstal, we are talking about military personnel and members of nationalist formations. Therefore, this is a different category of persons, and here we can hardly talk about any exchanges,” Peskov told reporters.
Leonid Slutsky himself, the first to openly accept the scenario of an exchange of the Azov Nazis, said this at a meeting with combat veterans:
“For us, the lives of our Russian prisoners are very valuable. They must be saved at any cost,” said Slutsky.
The DPR authorities themselves have so far promised a tribunal over the “Azovites.” The head of the republic, Denis Pushilin, stated this on the Rossiya 24 TV channel. He assured that the captive nationalists from Azovstal are being held on the territory of the DPR, and the charter of the tribunal under which they will be tried is being worked out.
“As for their fate (captured Azovites - ed.), they are now on the territory of the DPR. In the future, it is planned to hold an international tribunal, the relevant documents are now being prepared, the charter of the tribunal is being written, and it is possible that there will be intermediate tribunals, following the example of how this all happened during the Great Patriotic War. We know that before Nuremberg there was both the Kiev Tribunal and the Kharkov Tribunal. I do not rule out that we will follow the same path,” said Pushilin.
However, as you know, there is already a precedent in Russia when Aidar militant Nadezhda Savchenko, accused of war crimes - the murder of Russian journalists, received a sentence of 22 years, but was then released and returned to Ukraine in triumph.
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