Kyiv to submit prisoner lists to OSCE, to demand info about them

14:53, 25.05.2017 1 min read

Kyiv is set to submit a list of 128 Ukrainian citizens held in Donbas to the OSCE on Thursday in order to obtain information about them, Verkhovna Rada First Deputy Chairperson and Ukrainian representative in the Trilateral Contact Group's humanitarian subgroup Iryna Gerashchenko said.

"We demand that 128 Ukrainian citizens held on occupied territory be released. We will again submit this list to the OSCE today and will demand that information about the whereabouts of these people and their fate be provided and that they be included in the prisoner swap list," Gerashchenko said in parliament on Thursday.

The Ukrainian side also wants civilians held in occupied Donbas to be included in those lists, she said.

In Gerashchenko's words, Valeria Lutkovska, Ukraine's human rights commissioner, was not permitted at the negotiations in Minsk on Wednesday to visit prisons in the territories uncontrolled by Kyiv.

"They have said that a certain ombudsman from the so-called DPR [the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic] has already given mandate to a certain member of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine. We can only guess what it is about," she said.