Ten Ukrainians were detained for political reasons and are being held in jails in Russia, Director of Information Policy Department of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry Yevhen Perebyinis has said.

When asked on the air of the Hromadske TV on Tuesday evening about a member of the Ukrainian People's Self-Defense (UNSO), Mykola Karpiuk, who was detained and has been imprisoned in Russia since March 2014, the Foreign Ministry's spokesman said that "in fact there are currently a lot of Ukrainian political prisoners in the Russian Federation."

"I'm not ready to tell you specifically about Mykola Karpiuk, but we know that some ten citizens of Ukraine are held in various detention centers in Russia. They include Nadia Savchenko, and people who were detained together with Oleh Sentsov. In recent days, there also have been more reports about the detention of our citizens," he added.

Perebyinis said that the Embassy and the Consulate of Ukraine in the Russian Federation were taking efforts to free these Ukrainians, but they had got scarcely any positive response from the Russian side.