Minister for the Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories Iryna Vereshchuk said that Russia was holding more that 1,500 Ukrainian civilians captive.
She spoke about this at a briefing.
According to her, these Ukrainians (volunteers, activists, journalists, priests, deputies) are being held in Russian prisons in Rostov and Kursk. The difficulty is that civilians do not have a status under international law that can be exchanged. At the same time in Russia they sit as prisoners of war.
According to intelligence, the occupiers deported 1.2 million people from Ukraine to Russia, 240,000 of whom were children.
- However, Ukraine is trying to exchange and free civilians and soldiers from captivity. On June 18, five civilian Ukrainians returned home, and the day before, Ukrainian paramedic Yulia Tyra Paievska was released.