Ukraine starts making one-off payments to prisoners swapped in December 2017

Published June 13, 2018 at 4:57 pm

Volodymyr Ruban, a former informal negotiator in Donbass prisoner swaps, attends a hearing in a Kyiv district court on March 9, 2018. Ukraine on Friday charged a prisoner swap negotiator with plotting to assassinate President Petro Poroshenko and other senior officials by attacking their homes and offices with mortar fire and grenades.

Photo by AFP

Ukraine’s Ministry for Temporarily Occupied Territories and Internally Displaced Persons has begun making payments to persons freed from certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

“Another piece of important news, the ministry has begun making payments to prisoners and hostages freed in December,” First Deputy Speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament and Ukraine’s envoy to the Trilateral Contact Group’s humanitarian subgroup Iryna Gerashchenko said on her Facebook page on June 13.

As earlier reported, 74 persons illegally held prisoner in eastern Ukraine were freed in December 2017 in exchange for 233 prisoners held by Kyiv. It was the largest prisoner swap since 2015.