Russia will consider the possibility of exchanging the captured fighters of the Ukrainian Azov battalion with Viktor Medvedchuk, the Ukrainian politician and businessman close to Vladimir Putin, MP Leonid Slutsky, who is taking part in the negotiations on behalf of Moscow, said earlier on Saturday. "We will consider the issue," Slutsky said, according to Ria Novosti news agency, when asked about the matter."
From his home town of Donetsk in southeastern Ukraine, the Russian deputy clarified that the proposal of such an exchange would be taken to Moscow "by those who have the right."
Viktor Medvedchuk, 67, was arrested in mid-April in Ukraine. He had been under house arrest since May 2021 after being charged with "high treason" and "attempting to plunder the natural resources of Crimea," the peninsula Russia annexed in 2014.
On Friday, the Russian military announced that the last fighters defending Mariupol who had been holed up for weeks in the Azovstal steelworks had surrendered. Among them are members of the Azov battalion, a unit that the Kremlin describes as 'neo-Nazi'. Kiev hopes to exchange these fighters for Russian prisoners of war.
On 26 May, Russia's Supreme Court will consider a request to declare the Azov battalion a "terrorist organisation", which could complicate the exchange of prisoners.
Donetsk separatist leader Denis Pushilin said today that the Ukrainian soldiers who defended Azovstal and surrendered should be put on trial. "I think that the court is inevitable: justice must triumph," Pusilin said at the same press conference where Leonid Slutsky spoke.
Source: protothema.gr
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