Progress being made: Lubinets on Red Cross access to Ukrainian prisoners in Russia

In February, the Executive Director of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) will visit Ukraine to discuss with the Ombudsman new approaches to ensuring ICRC access to Ukrainian prisoners of war and unlawfully detained civilians in Russia.

This was reported by Ukraine’s Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, in a comment to Ukrinform.

“Progress is being made,” he said in response to a question about the issue of ICRC access to Ukrainian prisoners in Russia.

Lubinets recalled that he raised this issue on January 16 during a meeting with the ICRC President and officially invited the Committee’s leadership to visit Ukraine.

According to him, this month the ICRC leadership will visit Ukraine.

“The Executive Director of the ICRC himself will come. He is effectively the second-highest official in the Committee and will spend several days working in Ukraine. We will have a separate meeting and negotiations to see what new approaches they bring to Ukraine,” the Ombudsman added.

Lubinets also stated that the Ukrainian side has never paused its work on prisoner exchanges, while the Russian side sometimes delays the process.

“From the Ukrainian side, there have never been pauses in prisoner exchanges. The Ukrainian team works daily to bring our heroes and heroines back from Russian captivity,” he said.

The Ombudsman emphasized that negotiations are one stage of a complex exchange procedure, while the actual return of people is the final result.

“There have never been pauses in the negotiations – they continue. We are doing our work, but the Russian side, unfortunately, sometimes decides to delay these processes,” he added.

As previously reported by Ukrinform, during a meeting in Geneva, Lubinets invited the ICRC leadership to visit Ukraine to witness firsthand the consequences of Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure.