KYIV and LUHANSK, Ukraine. Jan 16 (Interfax) - Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has told the president of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE), Anne Brasseur, that more than 600 Ukrainian citizens are still held captive by eastern Ukrainian militias and asked PACE to help achieve their release.
At a meeting with a PACE delegation led by Brasseur, Poroshenko "emphasized the necessity of intensifying PACE efforts " to liberate Ukrainian hostages," the president's office said in a statement. "To date, over 600 Ukrainian citizens are in captivity, despite clear agreements reached in Minsk."
Poroshenko also urged PACE to do everything under its control for the release of Ukrainian pilot Nadiya Savchenko, who is under arrest in Russia.
The Ukrainian leader and the PACE delegation insisted that "the Minsk agreements must be unequivocally and immediately fulfilled, for they had been recognized by all the parties to the conflict," the statement said.
Meanwhile, the chairman of the parliament of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic, Alexei Karyakin, denied there were any Ukrainian prisoners in the LPR currently.
"I've called our military command today, and they say that we have no prisoners of war. However, hostilities are continuing. So there are suspicions that we will have some new war prisoners," a statement on Thursday by the Luhansk Information Center quoted Karyakin as saying.
Karyakin said that if the LPR took any Ukrainian soldiers prisoner, their names would be made available to the Ukrainian side and there would be talks on a new prisoner exchange.
Earlier, the LPR representative in the contact group on Ukraine, Vladislav Deinego, had said the LPR was determined to take no Ukrainians prisoner and would like to release all Ukrainians it had captured.
The last time Ukraine swapped prisoners with the LPR and self-declared Donetsk People's Republic was on December 26. The exchange was carried out on neutral territory.