KIEV, October 16. /TASS/. Law enforcers of Ukraine’s Lugansk region have brought charges against 304 officials from the self-proclaimed Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR), the press service of the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s officie said on Friday.
"In conformity with Ukraine’s criminal code, charges have been brought against 304 persons who are government officials and law enforcers of the LPR," the press service said. These people are charged with "overthrowing the constitutional system, seizing state power in Ukraine and altering the country’s borders."
The press service also said, investigators have arrested 163 transportation vehicles, 95 apartments, 41 private houses, seven land plots and 13 non-residential facilities owned by these people.
Kiev says 148 people still kept prisoner in self-proclaimed republics
Kiev says as many as 148 people are still kept prisoner in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR).
"A total of 148 Ukrainians are [kept prisoner] in Donbass. Information about them is collected from various sources and then verified. We now say there are 148 [prisoners], not 153," Yuri Tandit, an adviser to the chief of the Ukrainian Security Service, told the UNN news agency.
He said that the five persons included those who had been hiding in territories beyond Kiev’s control and later returned home and those whose bodies had been identified by relatives.
The Ukrainian Security Council chief, Vasily Gritsak, said on October 10 a total of 153 people had been held prisoner in Donbas.
A prisoner exchange that was to take place between Ukraine and the Lugansk Republic on Friday has been frustrated. Lugansk put the blame for that on Kiev. "Kiev has frustrated the prisoner exchange," Olga Kobtseva, an LPR representative in the Contac Group’s subgroup on humanitarian issues and prisoner exchanges, told LuganskINformCentre on Friday.
Earlier, she said that at the subgroup’s meeting in Minsk on October 6 the LPR said it was ready to release five people immediately.
The two self-proclaimed republics, DPR and LPR, have released 317 Ukrainian prisoners, while Ukraine has freed 287 people in the official prisoner exchange campaigns.
Prisoner exchanges in the all-for-all format is one of the key provisions of the Package of Measures on the implementation of the Minsk agreements that was signed in the Belarusian capital Minsk on February 12 after marathon talks between the leaders of Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine.
Apart from that, the 13-point Package of Measures on implementation of the September 2014 Minsk agreements, known as Minsk-2, in particular included an agreement on cessation of fire from February 15, withdrawal of heavy armaments, as well as measures on long-term political settlement of the situation in Ukraine, including establishment of working subgroups as priority tasks.