The lack of information on the number and whereabouts of the imprisoned soldiers exasperates the families, as they do not know if they are alive or fell at the front.
The last exchange of prisoners of war between Russia and Ukraine took place on June 29 and there is still no date for a new exchange. Then each of the parties released 144 soldiers, a number that, although the real figures of those captured on either side are unknown, are guessed to be insignificant.
The massacre of Ukrainian military captives on Friday in a penal colony in Olenivka, in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, has further increased mutual suspicion and mistrust. Nobody believes that the situation is going to be unblocked in the short term. The prisoners seem to have become a bargaining chip for anything but their release.
The Russian antenna of the International Committee of the Red Cross maintains that there are “thousands” of requests for help received in writing from relatives of Russian soldiers whose whereabouts are unknown. They want to know if and where they are prisoners or if they fell in combat and it is possible to recover their bodies.
The same is happening on the Ukrainian side and, above all, with the mothers and wives of the members of the Azov Battalion, who complain that they have not been able to speak to them once on the phone since they laid down their arms and surrendered to the armed forces. Russian and separatist forces on May 17.
This unit of the Ukrainian Army, considered “neo-Nazi” by Moscow, fiercely defended the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol for three months. Probably, a large part of their fighters perished on Friday in the strange attack on the Olenivka prison. According to the agreement reached in May with the mediation of the UN and the Red Cross, they should have been exchanged for Russian soldiers. But the rebel leaders of Donbas have already announced that, regardless of what was agreed with the United Nations, the commanders of the Azov Battalion and the foreign brigade members would be sentenced to death for “war crimes.”
In an attempt to unblock prisoner swaps, the Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian Parliament) this week amended the Criminal Code so that even Russian soldiers convicted of atrocities can be swapped, something the law did not allow until now. A new article, 841, has been added to the Penal Code on “exoneration from serving a sentence in relation to a decision to transfer a convicted person to exchange him as a prisoner of war.” In such a case, the sentence would be annulled.
On May 23, a kyiv court sentenced a Russian military officer, Vadim Shishimarin, to life in prison for the first time for war crimes, specifically for killing a civilian from the Sumy region. After appealing the ruling, this week his sentence was reduced to 15 years in prison. On the other hand, a court in the Poltava region sentenced two Russian soldiers, Alexander Bobikin and Alexander Ivanov, to 11 years and 6 months in prison for bombing residential areas in Kharkov.
reconstruction work
But, after the exchange at the end of June, the head of the Russian Instruction Committee, Alexander Bastrikin, announced that there would be no more exchanges in the near future. He proposed using those captured “for reconstruction work on destroyed infrastructure.” According to Bastrikin, the prisoners of war “will be kept in preventive detention centers – like the one destroyed on Friday in Olenivka – for the duration of the investigations” to determine what crimes they may have committed. The Russian judicial official put the number of Ukrainian prisoners of war at 2,000.
Days later, on July 6, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu raised the number to 3,826, of which 2,439 surrendered in Azovstal. For their part, the separatist authorities in Donbas claim to have captured some 8,000 Ukrainian soldiers. The one that has not yet provided figures, neither of prisoners nor of deaths in combat, is the Government of kyiv.
The status of prisoners of war is defined by the Third Geneva Convention of 1949, which also applies in cases where the conflict has not been officially declared. Such is the current case, since the ongoing invasion of Ukrainian territory is described by the Kremlin as a “special military operation”. However, organizations such as Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International maintain that both Moscow and kyiv fail to comply with the provisions of Geneva in relation to the captives. Russia and Ukraine also accuse each other of torture, atrocities and mistreatment of imprisoned soldiers.
They denounce an attack with 80 Russian missiles in Dnipropetrovsk
The Ukrainian authorities have denounced this Saturday an attack with more than 80 projectiles in the city of Nikopol, in Dnipropetrovsk. According to its governor, Valentin Reznichenko, the missiles have destroyed more than fifteen houses and as many agricultural facilities have been damaged. No fatalities have been reported, unlike Friday’s Russian bombing of a bus stop in Mykolaiv, which today has risen to seven dead.
On the other hand, the UN has offered to send a group of experts, if it receives “permission from both parties”, to investigate the attack on the Ukrainian prisoner of war prison in Olenivka, which left more than fifty dead.
Meanwhile, fighting continues in the invaded country, especially in the Donetsk region, the epicenter of the war today. For this reason, the Zelensky government has announced the “mandatory” evacuation of more than 200,000 residents before winter given the almost total destruction of the heating supply infrastructure by the fighting.
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