DONETSK. Aug 4 (Interfax) - There are 42 Ukrainian prisoners-of-war in the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR), its ombudsman Darya Morozova said.
"We worked thoroughly through the list of 109 people submitted by the Ukrainian side. I hereby state officially that 42 Ukrainian troops have been captured in the republic. All of them are ready for a prisoner exchange in the format spelt out in the Package of Measures to implement the Minsk agreements," she told journalists on Thursday.
"I will note that Ukraine's representatives in Minsk have confirmed just 618 people out of the 964 named in our list. Everything now depends on the political will of the Ukrainian president and his authorized representatives at Minsk meetings," Morozova said, adding that the DPR repeatedly proposed Ukrainian negotiators to devise a roadmap to search for missing people.
Donetsk insists on swift resolution of this issue, she said. "Four hundred eighty-nine families have asked us to help find their relatives in the hope to get at least some information about them. I can assume that they might also have been captured by Ukrainians. However, the figure cited by UN officials is even more frightening: over 3,500 people who have gone missing since the Ukrainian armed aggression began," the DPR ombudsman said.
Returning the children moved from the DPR to the area controlled by Ukrainian forces remains an issue, Morozova said.
"Officials in Kyiv have already started adding comments to the roadmap proposed by UNICEF [United Nations Children's Fund] representatives. We, too, have been adding ours. Regrettably, the issue remains open," Morozova said.