The head of the political council of the Ukrainian party Opposition Platform-For Life, Viktor Medvedchuk, and the party’s co-chair, Vadym Rabinovych, visited Ukrainian prisoners Mykola Karpiuk and Stanyslav Klykh in the detention facility Lefortovo on Friday.
“Our visit today is a humanitarian action, above all else. Moreover, we did not agree on it today or even yesterday. This agreement existed before, we made a request on behalf of our party because Opposition Platform-For Life is working on this issue, it is working on the issue of release, not a swap, but release,” Medvedchuk said on Ukraine television channel 112.
“The people we have visited today, Ukrainian citizens Karpiuk and Klykh, are people whose release we have been raising for a long time,” Medvedchuk said.
In the discussion on Karpiuk’s and Klykh’s release, there were many problems associated with the charges against them for which the Ukrainians were convicted, he said.
“Serious headway was made following the change in administration, after the arrival of the new team, President Zelensky’s team, which really started to work on exchange issues because we can only ask for release, that is, unilateral actions,” Medvedchuk said.
“Therefore, all these things make us confident that this exchange will take place in the near future and this exchange will include those people whose release we have been raising for a long time,” he said.
Medvedchuk called against forcing the developments and for waiting for official information on the Ukrainians’ release.
“Now we need to wait and I think this waiting will end successfully, in the first place for the people who are in Lefortovo,” he said.
Rabinovych, in turn, said the state is working on the issue of exchange, talks are now being held and “they are quite successful,” but he would not go into the details.
“I’m not going to tell you anything. We didn’t come for medals or orders, we came to fix some issues, maybe help with something, and I don’t want to say anything else on this matter for one simple reason: the less you say about the issue of release the sooner the people will be home,” Rabinovych said.
Klykh and Karpiuk were detained in March 2014. In May 2016, they were sentenced to 20 years and 22.5 years in prison, respectively, for fighting on the side of separatists and killing Russian troops in the first and second Chechen wars.
Medvedchuk earlier said the talks on the exchange of held persons between Ukraine and Russia are continuing, but that no final decision has yet been made on the issue of exchange of filmmaker Oleh Sentsov. According to Interfax’s sources, Sentsov, unlike many Ukrainians brought to Moscow and placed in Lefortovo, was taken to the Butyrka detention facility.
The Ukrainian prosecutor general’s press secretary, Larysa Sarhan, earlier said on social networks that a prisoner swap between Kyiv and Moscow using the 35×35 formula was possible.
