Russia, Ukraine hold talks over next prisoner swap in March
Ukraine says it has held talks with Russia on swapping all remaining prisoners from the conflict in eastern Ukraine as part of measures to ease tensions between Kiev and Moscow.
Ukraine's presidential office said in a statement Sunday that Andriy Yermak, president’s chief of staff has met with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak to discuss the swap, adding that the next prisoner exchange might take place later this month.
"The parties discussed the issues of the mutual release of the detainees," and the plan was to hold the next exchange in March, it added, without giving details on the size of the prisoner swap.
In December, the representatives of the Kiev government and the pro-Russia forces in Ukraine agreed to carry out an exchange by the end of the year.
The agreement came after Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy held their first face-to-face talks at a Paris summit in the same month and agreed to “commit to a full and comprehensive implementation” of a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine by the end of December and proceed with a new withdrawal of forces from conflict zones by March 2020.
Zelenskyy said at the time that he expected all the 72 Ukrainian prisoners held by the pro-Russians to return home before the year’s end.
Russia and Ukraine last swapped prisoners in September 2019, the first such exchange in two years.
The full release of the prisoners appears to pave the way for the restoration of relations between the two countries after a nearly five-year hiatus over the conflict.
The Ukrainian crisis began after a wave of protests in the capital Kieav overthrew a democratically-elected government in February 2014 and replaced it with a pro-West administration.
That new government then began a crackdown on the mainly ethnic Russians in the east, who in turn took up arms and turned the two regions of Donetsk and Lugansk — collectively known as the Donbass — into self-proclaimed republics.
Amid the Kiev protests, the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, then Ukrainian territory, held a referendum to join Russia. More than 90 percent of the participants in the referendum voted for reunification.
Kiev and its Western allies accuse Moscow of having a hand in the crisis, a charge Russia denies.
The war has claimed some 13,000 lives since 2014.
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