Georgian border guards did not let five former prisoners from the Kherson region, whom Moscow took to its territory before leaving the occupied regions of the Kherson region, into the territory of the country.
In a comment to Babel, the press service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted that the ministry, together with the competent authorities of Ukraine, is already dealing with this matter.
"Currently, their identities and legal aspects of serving the sentence determined by the court are being checked, the issue of their return to Ukraine is being worked out," the press release noted.
Aidana Fedosyk, head of the Unmode organization that helps Kherson prisoners, says that this is the first time that this has happened — before, Georgia always let Ukrainians through so that they could return to the Motherland.
In total, six men were not allowed into Georgia, one more is a Ukrainian who entered Russia and ended up in a filtration camp, but now he has released himself and is trying to leave the country.
The men have been in the buffer zone for the eighth day. Appeals to the Commissioner for Human Rights in Georgia and to Ukrainian diplomats have not yielded results yet. Suspilne writes that no Ukrainian diplomat has contacted them yet.
- In the fall of last year, the Russians, fleeing from the right-bank part of the Kherson region, took more than a thousand convicts through Crimea, several human rights organizations told "Mediazona". In most cases, these people were then sent to the colonies of Krasnodar Krai, Rostov and Volgograd regions, where they served the terms assigned by Ukrainian courts. After the expiration of the terms, Ukrainians are often sent to the courts, where they were recognized as illegally staying on the territory of Russia and settled in centers for temporary detention of foreign citizens. They can stay there for months, depending on what documents they have with them.