In Kiev, they announced their readiness to exchange prisoners with the DPR and LPR any day – RBK

Ukraine is ready to immediately begin an exchange of prisoners with the unrecognized Donetsk and Lugansk republics, transferring 58-59 people, but in Donbass they are not going to meet them. This was stated by the adviser to the head of the office of the President of Ukraine, speaker of the Ukrainian delegation to the Trilateral Contact Group Oleksiy Arestovich in the air TV channel “Dom”.

According to him, Kiev offered the unrecognized republics a number of prisoner exchange scenarios. “We are ready to exchange any day. We are ready to exchange for Christmas, for the New Year <...> But they (the authorities of the DPR and LPR. – RBK) do not go for it, tying everything to political exchanges. That is, the same story of head trafficking, the same story of trafficking in persons for the sake of politics, ”said the adviser to the head of the Ukrainian president’s office.

As Arestovich explained, as a condition for starting the process of exchange of prisoners, Kiev is required to recognize the authorities of the DPR and LPR. Now, he continued, there are also pregnant women or people with serious illnesses in correctional facilities. “For them, in general, every hour is a torture to be in those conditions,” he said.

In mid-December, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy included the exchange of prisoners in his proposal to resume the negotiation process to resolve the armed conflict in the east of the country. Boris Gryzlov, the plenipotentiary representative of Russia in the contact group, called his initiative “an imitation of activity.”