About fifty soldiers of the Ukrainian army died in the explosions which occurred on July 29 at the prison of Olenivka where they were detained. Their relatives demonstrated in the center of kyiv to demand news and dignified treatment of prisoners of war by Russia.
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“Save my Dad!” The sentence is written in blood red capital letters, and in English on little Olivia’s white t-shirt. The one-and-a-half-year-old girl and her mother Katia have not heard from Daniil since May 16, 2022, the day the Azovstal fighters surrendered. “The Russians unveiled the list of wounded after the terrorist attack and my husband was on itsays Katia. But I don’t know what state he is in now. Russia wanted to kill them so the world wouldn’t see what happened in Olenivka.”
>> What we know about the bombing of Olenivka prison, in the Donetsk region
A week after the explosions in the prison of Olenivka, in the east of Ukraine under the administration of pro-Russian separatists, Moscow and kyiv still blame each other while more than fifty prisoners of the Ukrainian army are dead. Most of them belonged to the controversial Azov battalion, this Ukrainian battalion accused of having neo-Nazis in its ranks. They were captured in Mariupol in May 2022 when they were defending the Azovstal industrial complex. In the center of kyiv, Thursday, August 4, their relatives demonstrated to demand that they be treated according to the principles of the Geneva Convention.
“I feel empty. I don’t know if he’s still alive and what to expect from the Russians. I just feel empty.”
Katia, wife of a Ukrainian prisonerat franceinfo
Sandra wears a black T-Shirt, with the drawn face of her brother smoking a cigarette. Bogdan Krotevych is the chief of staff of the Azov regiment. And it was to try to get him out of the enemy’s jails that she created the Azovstal families association a few weeks ago. “There are currently more than 850 soldiers of the Azov regiment imprisoned in Russiasays Sandra. They are either in the occupied zones, in Donetsk or Lugansk, or on Russian territory. They are often moved but it is to the International Committee of the Red Cross [le CICR] to control their place of detention and to know their state of health and this work is not done.”
On placards brandished at arm’s length, the ICRC and the United Nations are accused of complicity with Russian state terrorism. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres announced Wednesday, August 3, the establishment of a fact-finding mission into the Olenivka massacre.
Ukraine: relatives of prisoners demonstrate – Report by Thibault Lefèvre and Eric Audra
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