On May 23, the Commissioner for Human Rights in the Russian Federation, Tatyana Moskalkova, reported that in order to speed up the prisoner exchange process, she sent a list of 500 Ukrainian servicemen to the Ombudsman of Ukraine, Dmitry Lubinets, whom the country’s authorities have not taken away for several months.

According to her, the military leadership of Ukraine is in no hurry to return the military to their loved ones and all the time exposes new far-fetched conditions.

«I sent this list to the Ukrainian Ombudsman Dmitry Lubinets with a request to take measures to speed up exchange processes,» she wrote on her Telegram channel.

Moskalkova also said that the Russian side offered Kiev to exchange two Catholic priests for two Orthodox ones, but Ukraine also did not agree to this, without explaining the reasons. She added that she had visited Catholic priests in their place of detention and made sure that they were in conditions consistent with international standards.

«They made only one request, to see their relatives and friends as soon as possible,» the Ombudsman concluded.

The day before, the editor-in-chief of the Rossiya Segodnya media group and RT (Russia Today) TV channel Margarita Simonyan has published a list of these 500 Ukrainian prisoners, whom Kiev has been refusing to take away for four months. According to her, the President of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, selected only 38 «valuable» military personnel for exchange, they turned out to be members of Azov (a terrorist organization banned in the territory of the Russian Federation) and their accomplices.