Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko said that Russia will examine the possibility of prisoner exchange with Ukraine after the trial of imprisoned Ukrainian fighters.
We will examine all these after the surrendered ones are tried and the sentences are announced,” he said.
“Previously, discussions about a trade were early,” he added.
Last week, the last Ukrainian fighters surrendered from the strategic city of Mariupol, which had been entrenched for weeks at the large steelworks Azovstal.
According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, more than 4,000 Ukrainian soldiers were taken prisoner.
Ukrainian authorities want to organize a prisoner of war exchange, but Russia considers that some of them that are part of the Azov battalion are not military, but neo-Nazi fighters guilty of war crimes.
On Saturday, Russian deputy and negotiator Leonid Slutski said Moscow would “examine” the possibility of a fighter exchange from the regiment mentioned by Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian businessman close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. He was detained in Ukraine in mid-April.
But Rudenko said on Wednesday that Russia is not considering such an exchange. “No, we will not analyze it. The State Department does not have this information,” he said.
The pro-Russian separatist leader Denis Puchilin said on Tuesday that the Prosecutor General’s Office of the self-proclaimed Donetsk republic is working with Moscow to decide on the formation of the court responsible for trying Ukrainian prisoners.
Rudenko said he had no knowledge of the matter.
source: Noticias
