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Savchenko sends letter to Poroshenko urging to speed up release of POWs in Donbass

"I will await a meeting with the president to hand over the lists (of prisoners-of-war) to him. Their mothers will be waiting for this meeting too," Nadezhda Savchenko said

Nadezhda Savchenko Pyotr Sivkov/TASS

Nadezhda Savchenko

© Pyotr Sivkov/TASS

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KIEV, August 8. /TASS/. Former Ukrainian pilot and currently a Verkhovna Rada member from the Batkivshchyna (Fatherland) political party Nadezhda Savchenko has forwarded a letter to Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko from relatives of Ukrainians who are in custody in the Donbass region demanding their speedy release.

"The letter has been registered, I will await a meeting with the president to hand over the lists (of prisoners-of-war) to him. Their mothers will be waiting for this meeting too," Savchenko told the 112 Ukraine TV channel.

She expressed the hope that the meeting with Poroshenko will take place as early as this week. Savchenko noted that people want the head of state to inform them about the government’s actions on prisoner swaps.

She added that at the moment a group of 4-7 people deals with the issue on a voluntary basis, and neither the exact number of prisoners-of-war nor the number of representatives of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk republics (DPR, LPR) detained by the Ukrainian intelligence services is known.

Earlier on Monday, Savchenko organized a rally outside the presidential administration building that brought together several dozen people, including mothers of prisoners-of-war. The protesters demanded that the Ukrainian president assist their early release.

A Russian court found Nadezhda Savchenko, a former servicewoman of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, guilty of involvement in the killing of Russian TV reporters Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin and illegally crossing the Russian border.

On March 22, a court in Donetsk, a town in Russia’s southern Rostov region, sentenced her to 22 years in a general penal colony.

At the request of Kornelyuk and Voloshin’s relatives, Russian President Vladimir Putin pardoned Savchenko on May 25. A jet took her to Kiev shortly after.

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