In Kyiv they explained why the exchange of prisoners of war on the principle of “all for all” was stopped
Moscow - Kyiv, October 13 (PolitNavigator, Mikhail Stamm) - Vasily Budnik, adviser to the Minister of Defense of Ukraine on the exchange of prisoners, told Kommersant that the exchange stopped because of the desire of the militia to get everyone detained in Ukraine for “separatism.” Kyiv is ready to hand over only those detained in the ATO zone, among whom there are many random people.
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Budnik confirmed that about 600 people remain captured by the DPR, and about 400 people by the Ukrainian side. Of these, according to him, about 240 are military personnel, the rest are volunteer units, the National Guard, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. But this does not take into account volunteers and the civilian population. “So we can only guess the exact number, based on the number of requests from relatives that we received,” says Budnik.
An adviser to the Minister of Defense explained why the Ukrainian Defense Ministry is only engaged in military exchanges. “This is a certain number of people who are not taken into account. They don't have a contract or anything. If a person dies or is injured, the question arises: where have you been? Why were you there? Who gave you the weapon? The desire is good: to come to defend Ukraine, but in the end he is actually a criminal from a legal point of view. He is in a certain group, armed, which has a structure, if you look at the characteristics of the organized crime group. So far we have hundreds of people who are fighting for Ukraine in this form. How many of them were captured is a big question.”
But the main thing, according to Budnik, is the principle of prisoner exchange with the DPR. “There must be an understanding of who we mean by prisoners of war? - he reasons. – One of the nuances is that they offer us to hand over those detained on the territory of Zaporozhye, Kharkov, Kyiv, to some sabotage and terrorist groups. Should we consider them prisoners of war? The SBU conducted a special operation and detained saboteurs who were blowing up a railway in Kharkov. What kind of people are these? The problem is that we discussed in Minsk that we would work with people detained in the ATO zone. Today they are putting forward a condition to us: to hand over people detained throughout Ukraine.”
“It’s easy in the DPR: get it out of the basement, please. And we have a whole bureaucratic machine: we need to acquit him, change the measure of restraint, justify why we are giving him away. Because of this, the exchange has now stalled,” explains the adviser.
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