Despite the Ukrainian government’s claim of having no contact with Kremlin-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, officials have for months engaged in negotiations to swap prisoners.
Although secret groups in the Security Service of Ukraine and other agencies work on the issue, much of the work is being done by a couple of independent negotiators who are former senior military or police officials who have only a loose connection with Kyiv.
As of July 17, there are more than 40 Ukrainian soldiers held as prisoners of war by Moscow-backed separatists, according to Andriy Lysenko, spokesperson for the National Security and Defense Council.
But the true number of people held in captivity is in the hundreds, and changes all the time, according to Nikolai Yakubovich, a negotiator who had also been imprisoned in Donetsk Oblast’s Horlivka in May.
“In Luhansk it’s in the order of 150, and in Donetsk and Horlivka there are also more than 100, probably close to 120. There are at least 20 people in Horlivka, there are civic activists that the militants have started grabbing,” Yakubovich explains.
But the Ukrainian government has also been capturing militants in the east, and their number in detention is more than 200, according to Yakubovich, who is an unofficial adviser to the National Security and Defense Council Secretary, serving as a link between prisoners in the east and the government.
“SIZOs (pre-trial detention centers) are filled not just in the east, but in Kyiv also,” says one senior security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk about the subject with the media.
But prisoner swaps take place slowly.
Natali Budik has been fighting for the release of her husband, Vasili Budik, from prison since May 2. Her husband was taken off the street as he walked home in Horlivka. Several separatists approached and held a gun to his head and took him away. Natalya Budik says she has no idea why Vasili was taken. A citizen of Georgia and owner of a web design studio, she says the only crime he committed was being “too pro-Ukrainian on his Facebook page.”
Vasiliy is being held with more than a dozen other people, most of whom are Ukrainian servicemen.
The highest ranking among them is Oleksandr Vasiushchenko, a colonel of Ukraine’s Security Service and head of the Artemivsk office. After weeks of negotiations, a deal was struck to free the group of prisoners. But Natalya Budik claims the president’s office blocked the exchange brokered by an independent negotiator
Budik, along with mothers of five other soldiers held captive, picketed Bankova Street for five days demanding that an exchange be approved. She has also been petitioning other Ukrainian government agencies. For example, one of her three petitions to the SBU was filed on July 9, and she said she was promised a written answer on Aug. 7 or 8.
“They don’t give a damn about our guys – this is my dominating feeling in the past two months… that POWs are thrown in jail and are forgotten about,” she said. “I am writing petitions – what else can I do?”
Reportedly, Horlivka separatist leader Igor Bezler was prepared to exchange 15 prisoners for Olga Kulygina, held by the Ukrainian side. Originally, she was rumored to be Bezler’s lover, but the SBU allegedly found evidence that she is one of the ideologists who designed the takeover of southeastern Ukraine.
But Ukrainian officials say there is a reason why that particular exchange has not taken place.
Yakubovich says “she is a staff agent of the FSB (Russian Federal Security Service). One government official said that the Ukrainian SBU captured memory sticks that support their suspicions. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not entitled to comment about prisoner exchanges. “So, if she is exchanged, it will be at a minimum for Nadiya Savchenko, to show that the Russians are in the middle of it. Ukrainian pilot Savchenko was detained by Kremlin-backed insurgents in Luhansk on June 17, and illegally transported to the Russian Federation on June 24, according to Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry. She was held in a hotel in Voronezh until June 30, and then detained by the Russian Federation and accused of illegally crossing the border.
Savchenko had her first meeting with a Ukrainian consul on July 17. She told the consul that she was taken across the border via a separatist-controlled border checkpoint, handcuffed and transported with a sack on her head.
Ukraine’s authorities suspect that the Russian Federation has more Ukrainian soldiers in jail, taken out of the country in the same manner, but so far have no proof.
Some prisoners of war have not survived. On July 15, Lysenko, the National Security and Defense Council spokesman, said that two pilots from the AN-26 cargo plane that had been presumably shot down by a Russian air-to-air missile on July 14 were held by separatists. Just two days later, he said that they were dead and the government had trouble reclaiming their bodies because they’re in the part of Luhansk Oblast controlled by the separatists.
Volodymyr Ruban, another negotiator, told Zerkalo Nedeli last week that separatists only capture civilians and soldiers, and shoot anyone who is a member of the National Guard or volunteer battalions.
But Yakubovich says “there have been several cases when guardsmen were taken prisoners, but then they were either freed or exchanged. What I know is that there have been cases when injured men were finished off.”
He says that his own experience in a separatist prison showed that it was very dangerous. Some prisoners are “kept in beastly conditions” with no medical assistance available. Their lives are in danger because many of their captors have no idea how to handle weapons, and accidents with weapons can happen easily.
