Russia sets new demands to ”all-for-all” prisoner swap

Friday, April 15, 2016 - 13:50 (EEST) Section: Latest news

Russian Permanent Representative to the OSCE Alexander Lukashevich insists that as part of the exchange of ”all for all” Ukraine should release all the terrorists detained in different regions of Ukraine, as well as Russian citizens, who came to Ukraine ”to visit relatives,” the Russian Foreign Ministry told an UNIAN correspondent in Russia.
”The exchange of detainees on an ”all for all” basis still requires solutions. Due to the events in the south-eastern Ukraine, a significant number of people are imprisoned not only in the Donbas conflict zone, but also in Kharkiv, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk, Kyiv, and other parts of Ukraine. We do not receive adequate information from the Ukrainian side about the fate of Russian citizens, who come to visit their relatives and then go missing,” Lukashevich said at a meeting of the OSCE Permanent Council on Friday.
He said that the Russian Federation did not rule out that they had been arrested by the SBU Security Service of Ukraine without due process or had been detained incommunicado.
Moreover, Lukashevich does not like the active actions of the Ukrainian authorities against the pro-Russian protests in the country.
”As for the ”domestic separatism”… The content of posters around the country explains who is to be arrested by political police of Ukraine. In particular, a separatist would even a person agitating against mobilization. Other signs of crime include: desecration of the values of the Ukrainian people, casting doubts about the existence of the Ukrainian nation, spreading rumors about an inexistent threat to Russian language as well as fear and panic, praising `LPR` and `DPR,` etc. This is the interpretation of Article 110 of the Criminal Code, which provides for punishment up to 12 years in prison,” he said.
The Russian representative came to the conclusion that the struggle against separatism was also a tool of internal political clashes in Ukraine.
Lukashevich called on the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission not be limited to the supervision of ”the human rights situation in the Donbas,” but to keep track of what`s going in the government-controlled areas of Ukraine.