LONDON, Aug 12 (Reuters) – Russia’s human rights commissioner published on Wednesday a list of 224 Ukrainian prisoners of war that she said Moscow was ready to exchange but that Kyiv had rejected, part of a dispute over which side is hampering exchange efforts.
Thousands of prisoners have been exchanged since the start of the full-scale war in February 2022. An agreement in May to swap a further 1,000 captives each was one of the main tangible results of U.S.-brokered peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine.
A number of exchanges have taken place since then, but on Monday “I Want to Find”, a Ukrainian government-backed project that tracks the status of captured or killed Russian soldiers, accused Moscow of excluding from exchange lists POWs from Russian-held territory in Ukraine.
Denying the allegation in a video statement, Russian human rights commissioner Yana Lantratova said Russia did not discriminate against those from Russian-held parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
“For our part, we are ready for an exchange,” she said in a statement, saying Russia had proposed three different lists of potential candidates for a swap to Ukraine over the past month. “But Ukraine is refusing to take back its own citizens.”
Her statement linked to a list of 224 Ukrainians she said Kyiv had most recently declined to exchange.
Ukraine’s parliamentary commissioner for human rights, Dmytro Lubinets, said the claim that Ukraine had rejected proposed swaps was “cynical lies”.
“Ukraine is always committed to bringing back every one of its citizens—and works toward this goal every day,” he said on the Telegram messaging app on Wednesday.
Neither side publishes comprehensive figures for the number of prisoners of war it holds and both accuse the other of abuses.
On Monday, a U.N. human rights official said U.N. monitoring showed ongoing “widespread and systematic torture and ill-treatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war and civilian detainees by the Russian Federation authorities.”
The monitoring had also documented torture and ill-treatment of Russian POWs held by Ukraine, but “on a fundamentally different scale,” the official said at an informal Security Council meeting.
Russia’s representative at the meeting rejected the allegations against it.
(Reporting by Reuters, Writing by Alessandra PrenticeEditing by Keith Weir)
Comments