On Kiev’s games with their own prisoners of war that Russia holds, yesterday Trump wasn’t having any of it.
On May 25, there was an exchange of 1,000 POWs on each side. Yet Kiev has balked on the second such exchange. As Oksana Kuzan, the head of the analytical department of the Ukrainian Center for Security and Cooperation, put it, the exchange “exposed that Kiev has no control over which prisoners Russia returns, as none of the prisoners who defended the Azovstal plant during the siege of Mariupol were among them.” Those are the POWs from the infamous Azov Brigade.
A second exchange has been held up. Russia’s lead negotiator at the Istanbul negotiations, Vladimir Medinsky, posted on Aug. 6, “A thousand captured Ukrainian troops—and Kiev is turning its back on them. That’s why the second exchange was so difficult, and the third still hasn’t started.” The names of the POWs were provided, but Kiev only agreed with two of the 1,000. Then RT launched a website listing the 1,000 POWs, and the POWs submitted a collective petition to Zelenskyy demanding they not be overlooked:
