Kyiv (dpa-AFX) – According to the government in Kyiv, Russia is holding around 700 Ukrainian soldiers and hundreds of civilians in captivity. “They caught more than 1,000 people,” said Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk on Ukraine’s national television on Saturday. Among them are about 500 women. For its part, Ukraine captured around 700 Russian soldiers. Vereshchuk urged Russia to unconditionally release the civilians. Since the war began more than seven weeks ago, both sides have exchanged prisoners several times.
The exact numbers of how many people are currently being held are unclear. According to Russian media, the separatists in Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine alone captured more than 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers. More than 1,000 marines are said to have surrendered in the besieged port city of Mariupol. Ukraine denies this.
The United Nations officially registered about 2,000 civilians killed since the beginning of the Russian war of aggression on February 24. Like the government in Kyiv, the UN assumes that the number of victims among the civilian population will be far higher./ast/DP/zb