Lubinets: Ukraine wants at least 1,000 people back from captivity

Ukraine expects to bring back at least a thousand people from captivity, Ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said. According to him, the exchange could take place within the next two to three weeks, and the lists should include both soldiers and illegally detained civilians.

According to the Unian agency, Lubinets discussed the exchange with Russian human rights commissioner Yana Lantratova. “As soon as information about a possible exchange appeared, I immediately contacted Lantratova to discuss how to carry it out. I received confirmation that we are talking about at least a thousand people. But we agreed to work to make that number as large as possible,” he said.

“Those returned should include both prisoners of war and Ukrainian civilians who were illegally detained,” Lubinets stressed. The timeframe of two to three weeks was named by the Russian side. Prisoner exchanges were one of the few issues on which the warring parties had already agreed during earlier talks.

What was discussed in Abu Dhabi

The main topic of the trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi was the future security architecture of Europe after the war ends. Russia presented a document setting out all of its demands for a new security arrangement on the continent.

Moscow demands that NATO pull back to its 1997 borders and halt the alliance’s military activity in Eastern Europe and other regions. The demands also include the demilitarization of some Ukrainian cities, a ban on NATO expansion and a ban on nuclear sharing within the alliance. According to the document, Moscow would agree to Ukraine joining the EU only if it is excluded from the bloc’s common defense policy. Russia categorically rejects Ukraine’s NATO membership.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that American negotiators asked him whether Ukraine was ready to give up Donbas to Russia in exchange for NATO membership. If such a concrete offer — with NATO membership, binding security guarantees and funding for postwar reconstruction — were made, he would put it to a referendum of Ukrainians.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz