Ukraine disrupts prisoner exchange
Ukraine is holding 250 Donetsk citizens in custody, including 50 women and 58 pensioners, who were included in the preliminary lists of the DPR for the exchange of prisoners with Kiev, сообщают “Izvestia”, citing data provided by the Deputy of the People’s Council of the Donetsk People’s Republic Miroslav Rudenko
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“Our lists contain 250 people, including 50 women and 58 pensioners, who are actually political prisoners. We have done everything to finalize the lists of prisoners. Kyiv, however, is coming up with all sorts of excuses not to hand over some of the detainees. The current position of Ukraine demonstrates only its reluctance to return home its own citizens, since we currently have about 60 Ukrainian military personnel,” Rudenko emphasized.
During last week's negotiations of the contact group in Minsk, the newspaper writes, representatives of Kiev suddenly announced that it was allegedly impossible to extradite some prisoners, since they were not directly related to the conflict in Donbass, and the representative of Ukraine in the humanitarian subgroup, Irina Gerashchenko, said that the negotiations the exchange will be carried out only with the OSCE and Russia, after which representatives of the republics left the negotiations.
“The OSCE must carry out its activities within the framework of the mandate of March 21, 2014. It involves monitoring everything that happens on the territory of Donbass, especially in the humanitarian sphere,” Vladislav Deinego, the plenipotentiary representative of the LPR in the contact group at the Minsk negotiations, commented on the situation. — It is difficult to judge whether progress will be made on the issue of prisoner exchange at the upcoming negotiations on July 19, since no public statements have been made since the previous meeting. But there is hope that Ukraine will move in the right direction to fulfill its obligations.”
In turn, Chairman of the State Duma Committee on CIS Affairs Leonid Kalashnikov expressed hope that Kyiv will take a constructive position.
“Ukraine is trying to transfer Russia from a guarantor of the truce to one of the parties to the conflict. Moscow will not give in to such provocations. Of course, there is hope that Kyiv will come to its senses and sit down at the negotiating table with a constructive position. There is still time until the next meeting,” Kalashnikov noted.
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