MOSCOW. Jan 31 (Interfax) - The list of captives who would be exchanged between Ukraine and the self-proclaimed Donbas republics will undergo additional coordination on January 31; the sides have dropped the 'all for all' principle and started to exchange the captives in a phased manner, the newspaper Izvestia said on Wednesday citing sources in the DPR and the LPR.
"The next coordination of the lists of would-be-exchanged captives will happen as early as today, at a meeting of the [Trilateral] Contact Group in Minsk. The attempts to implement the prisoner swap provision of the Minsk Agreements have failed. This is because the Ukrainian side keeps finding a pretext for not letting particular captives go home," the newspaper said.
"Administrations of the Donbas republics have decided to free from captivity as many people as possible," Izvestia said. "It is better to bring the guys home step by step than to leave them in Ukrainian prisons," a representative of the DPR government told the newspaper.
Another DPR source told the newspaper that "75 out of 84 Donbas residents requested for being transferred by Ukraine were in captivity since December, and the other nine were detained just recently."
DPR People's Council Chairman Denis Pushilin told Izvestia that the January 31 meeting of the Trilateral Contact Group in Minsk would make coordination of captives' lists one of its priorities.
'The number of captives is changing day to day, because the conflict is ongoing and more people are being detained by both sides. The captive problem will be a key item on the agenda of the January 31 meeting in Minsk," the newspaper quoted Pushilin as saying.
"Ukraine is using the captives as a tool of psychological pressure on Donbas," the newspaper quoted the LPR head's advisor and representative to the political subgroup of the Trilateral Contact Group, Rodion Miroshnik, as saying.
"Pardon me, but this is a war currency Ukraine is unwilling to part with. Kyiv kept stalling the exchange with new ideas until December. A political will would have made the full-scale exchange possible. But the situation is different. There is bargaining and struggle for every person. Any numbers would be ephemeral until the lists receive a final approval," Miroshnik told Izvestia.