Ukraine has captured hundreds of Russian soldiers since the beginning of the military conflict with Russia, its Deputy Prime Minister Irina Vereshchuk claimed on Saturday.
"At present, we officially have 562 prisoners of war of the Russian Federation," she alleged in an interview with the television channel TSN. The Russian Ministry of Defense hasn't confirmed the information, and she offered no evidence to support her assertion.
All of the captured Russians have been listed on a special register, Vereshchuk maintained.
Earlier, Ukraine's Prosecutor General told British state broadcaster BBC that camps for Russian prisoners of war had been set up in her country. Irina Venediktova claimed that all the troops are treated according to the Geneva Convention and medical care is available in the camps. However, numerous Russian prisoners of war have been filmed in "confession" videos, since the start of the conflict.
As for Ukrainian captives, Vereshchuk asserted that Ukraine has not yet managed to distinguish more recent ones from those held since 2014, when the conflict in Donbass region broke out. "There are several hundreds of them," the deputy prime minister said. "But, if we roughly separate it, we roughly know that there are about 270 of our prisoners. The ones that are recorded, the ones that we have in the register. In total [since 2014] there are about 650 of them."