Separatists hold captive about 300 Ukrainian servicemen – activist

The illegal armed groups in Donbas hold captive about 300 Ukrainian servicemen, not 115 as the official Kyiv claims.

Oleh Kotenko, the chairman of the Patriot volunteer group, said this on the air of Ukrainian Hromadske Radio.

“When they mention 115 people, I really do not understand this figure as it was 129 people a week before and now it is 115 though there have been no exchanges. So, why the number has dropped? I am skeptical about such statistics because I know how many people are indeed held captive. Our unofficial number of captives is 300 people,” Kotenko said.

In turn, Maksym Tymochko, the lawyer at the Ukrainian Helsinki Human Rights Union, said that it was very difficult to define the exact number of civilians held captive since the reports on disappearance came very chaotically.

“The mechanisms of reports on seizure of civilians and servicemen are completely different as the information about the prisoners of war (i.e. servicemen held captive) usually comes to the law enforcement agencies from military units. As for the civilians, the nature of reports is quite chaotic, but people usually go to the national police units. Honestly speaking, bringing this to a single statistical base is a real challenge. Therefore, we can only talk about very approximate data on these persons,” he said.