Freed from captivity Zhemchuhov, Suprun require serious treatment

Ukrainians Volodymyr Zhemchuhov and Yuri Suprun, who were freed from captivity in Donbas, require serious treatment and rehabilitation.

Iryna Gerashchenko, the First Vice Speaker of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine and Ukraine’s representative in the humanitarian subgroup in the Trilateral Contact Group in Minsk, posted this on her Facebook page.

“Volodymyr Zhemchuhov and Yuri Suprun are free! Volodymyr and Yuri will be in one of the best hospitals in Kyiv in few hours, the President instructed to send a medical evacuation plane to deliver them to the hospital. They need serious treatment and rehabilitation. Moreover, Volodymyr needs prostheses,” Gerashchenko wrote.

She also revealed the details of the prisoner transfer held on September 17.

“Mutilated, without limbs, almost blind, captured by militants a year ago, Volodymyr spent last few months even not in a prison hospital, but in a ward. He was being dragged to so-called ‘trial’, being threatened with thirty years in prison. These orcs held Volodymyr in prison in such a terrible condition… I do not know how the heart of his wife Olena did not broke at their meeting… We all were crying,” Gerashchenko wrote.

According to her, released UN representative Yuri Suprun for past few weeks “was also being dragged to courts. Militants were boldly ignoring a special diplomatic immunity that Yuri had as an employee of the international humanitarian organization.”

“Tonight Yuri was ‘tried’ in Donetsk and ‘sentenced’ to 18 years in prison for spying for Ukraine. This circus was needed to ‘pardon’ him, not just transfer,” Gerashchenko noted.

She stresses that the Ukrainians were freed due to exceptional efforts of the Ukrainian President, Security Service, and the Minsk humanitarian subgroup. Fight for Zhemchuhov was being carried out throughout the year.

“Representatives of certain areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions cheated us saying they did not hold captive such a man, then saying he was in the apartment of his mother in the town of Krasnyi Luch (meanwhile his old mother cried me on the phone she does not know where her son is), then so-called ‘humanists’ argued he was not seriously ill, but was a saboteur and now had to learn to live in prison in new realities. They concealed his whereabouts, demanded a real ransom for him and demanded that we should exchange several dozens criminals for him,” Gerashchenko wrote.

According to her, President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko raised the issue of release of Zhemchuhov and Suprun during a June phone conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Meanwhile, even the representatives of international organizations admitted in informal conversations that they saw for the first time in their practice that a special status of UN staff and immunity did not help to free a man from captivity. This has not happened even in African countries.

Gerashchenko informed that Zhemchuhov and Suprun had been exchanged for “four villains and traitors who do not love their country.”