Moscow has attempted to trade Ukrainian civilians for Russian military prisoners, according to Ukraine\u2019s deputy prime minister – a move forbidden by the Geneva Convention.<\/p>\n
Iryna Vereshchuk told the BBC that her office, which is responsible for negotiating prisoner swaps, declined and instructed Russia to send back Ukrainian civilians it had taken.<\/p>\n
There is growing evidence that Russia has forcibly deported large numbers of civilians across the border since it invaded the country in February.<\/p>\n
Ms Vereshchuk said they were being used as hostages.\u201cThat’s why they captured all these hostages – civilians, women, employees of local councils, to try and use them,” she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe know there are more than a thousand hostages there – including almost 500 women,\u201d she said. \u201cWe know they are in prisons and pre-trial detention centres in Kursk, in Briansk, in Riazan, in Rostov.”<\/p>\n
She said Russia had also dragged its feet in sending back women civilians. \u201cWe are extracting women almost with pliers,\u201d she said. \u201cNow we refuse to hold an exchange with no women in the list. That is how we try to somehow rescue our women and civilians.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the most recent exchange, nine civilians were sent back with severe injuries, including amputations performed in Russia.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were badly injured people in this exchange – amputated limbs, sepsis, other severe injuries,” Ms Vereshchuk said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were clear signs of torture,” she said. “The stories they told us are terrible.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Moscow has attempted to trade Ukrainian civilians for Russian military prisoners, according to Ukraine\u2019s deputy prime minister – a move forbidden by the Geneva Convention. Iryna Vereshchuk told the BBC that her office, which is responsible for negotiating prisoner swaps, declined and instructed Russia to send back Ukrainian civilians it had taken. There is growing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":20658,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_post_source_name":"","_post_source_url":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[2735,9204,6173,12758,6848,10484,10391,9304,9127,12173,11111,11525,5897,5572,5340,7968,3174,11926,10266,3457,5217,7586,10329,11581,5180,5177,5555,6348,5320],"class_list":["post-20947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-news","tag-bbc","tag-border","tag-briansk","tag-captured","tag-civilians","tag-convention","tag-declined","tag-detention","tag-february","tag-hostages","tag-injured","tag-injuries","tag-kursk","tag-military","tag-moscow","tag-nine","tag-prime-minister","tag-prisoners","tag-rostov","tag-russia","tag-russian","tag-torture","tag-trade","tag-trial","tag-ukraine","tag-ukraines-president-volodymyr-zelensky","tag-ukrainian","tag-us","tag-women"],"blocksy_meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20947\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nsemgh.com\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}