Militants blocking swap of captives from lists provided at Minsk meeting – Kyiv
Representatives of the self-proclaimed Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR) People’s Republics have not responded to the Ukrainian side’s proposal announced in Minsk on January 13 to release 25 Ukrainian citizens being illegally held in Donbas, Iryna Gerashchenko, the Ukrainian president’s envoy for the peace process in Donbas, has said.
“Those who went through the hell of the [Donetsk] airport still remain in militants’ captivity. We have included these heroes’ surnames in each list of persons who should be freed. So far, the militants have been blocking their release, and there is still no reply to our January 13 suggestion to release 25 Ukrainians,” Gerashchenko wrote on her Facebook account.
It was reported that the issue of prisoner exchanges was a key one on the agenda of a January 13 meeting of the humanitarian subgroup within the trilateral Contact Group for Ukraine in Minsk. According to Gerashchenko, the Ukrainian side provided all lists and proposals back on January 6 and submitted them again at the latest meeting in Minsk, but there was still no response as of January 15.
On January 15, Gerashchenko also mentioned remarks made by Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the foreign minister of Germany, which currently chairs the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, who said at the OSCE’s first session this year in Vienna that militants could release captives in the coming days.