“We will not stop until the last of our soldiers is freed”

The Joint Hostage Release Coordination Center has among its personnel the ministry’s own experts as well as volunteers and public figures who work of their own accord to free our POWs. Yurii Tandit is of the latter kind; having dealt with hostage release talks since the summer, he has been appointed to lead the coordination center. Besides the search group, it includes psychologists, doctors, logistics support specialists who work on everything from comfortable transportation for getting POWs home to providing them with clothing and food. According to the State Security Service of Ukraine, there were 684 hostages in enemy hands as of December 8, 181 of them were soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and about 1,600 persons were listed as missing. The experts would like to have most soldiers freed by the year’s end, but they dare not promise anything, for a lot depends on the other side of the negotiating process.

“As for exchanging all for all, we are ready to hold the general release in this way, but there are issues still with the other side. The so-called Ministry of Defense of the Donetsk People’s Republic has established a group dealing with releasing our guys, and we are negotiating with them. They have been refusing to free officers and any servicemen from volunteer battalions. The official version of the other side is that our officers refuse to be freed until the last enlisted man gets released. As for volunteers, the militants believe that some of them committed reprehensible acts, and the enemy also believes that it was the volunteers who stopped the invasion in May and June, these soldiers have become staunch patriots, and this is another reason why the militants do not want to release them,” Tandit noted.

As for releasing the hostages now held in Russia, the parties are still at the dialog and negotiation level. No list with names of POWs and places where they are being held will be released, since the negotiators believe that scammers would be likely to use any such list, turning prisoner exchanges into ransom schemes.

Also, the center plans to deal with social security needs of negotiators who often risk their lives as they go to the front lines. Advisor to deputy minister of defense Vasyl Budyk told us that the center would hold seminars for such persons, involving foreign consultants as well. Budyk added that on some occasions, different negotiating groups were negotiating about the same hostages’ fate, but with different groups of militants. That is, they lacked co-ordination and did not exchange information. These problems should go away now. The center will work until the last of our soldiers is freed.