Russia and Ukraine exchange prisoners in bid to ease tension

Russia and Ukraine exchanged several dozen prisoners yesterday as they moved to dial down tensions in a swap that included captured Ukrainian sailors and a suspect in the 2014 downing of a Malaysia Airlines plane.

Thirty-five from each side were involved in the handovers, which has been highly antici- pated and come less than four months after Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, took office promising to open fresh channels of dialogue with Moscow.

Ukrainians, in particular, have long sought the release of those held by Russia in the five years since Moscow seized Crimea and began sponsoring a rebellion in eastern Ukraine.

At 1.25pm local time, planes from each country landed back home with the released detainees aboard.

Ukraine’s twin-engine Antonov-48 was met by a crowd of relatives and government officials, including Zelensky. One by one, the detainees appeared at the door, walked down the few steps to the tarmac, and shook hands with Zelensky, as relatives cheered and called out their names.

Then came smiles and tears and hugs and selfies. Vassily Soroka, a security service officer who had been on a boat captured by Russia last year, was greeted by several generations of his family, engulfing him in a huge communal bear hug.

A Crimean filmmaker, Oleg Sentsov, who conducted a lengthy hunger strike in a Russian prison last year, and became a cause celebre in Kyiv, was in the group released by Moscow, as well as 24 sailors, including Soroka, whose ships were seized by Russia in a strait off the Crimean coast.

Among those sent to Moscow was Volodymyr Tsemakh, a suspect in the 2014 downing of the Malaysian passenger jet over the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine, which killed 298 people, the majority of them Dutch. Criminal investigators from the Netherlands had been hoping to interview him in Kiev, but they will have no access to him now.

Sentsov had been in Russian custody since 2014, when he was arrested shortly after Moscow seized Crimea from Ukraine, in response to the overthrow of former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. The Crimean takeover was followed soon after by an insurgency in two of Ukraine’s eastern regions – Donetsk and Luhansk – that was backed by Moscow. That conflict has remained at more or less of a stalemate for the past five years.

The filmmaker was sentenced by a Russian court to a 20-year term, convicted of plotting an act of terrorism. Last December he was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought by the European parliament, and prominent filmmakers in Europe as well as Russia have offered public statements of support.

– Washington Post