MOSCOW, June 20. /TASS/. Exchanging prisoners of war is painstaking work and there should not be a lot of talk around this process, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Tuesday.

Earlier, Adviser to the Head of the Office of the Ukrainian President Mikhail Podolyak said that Kiev would strive to exchange 22 members of the Azov nationalist battalion (recognized as a terrorist organization and outlawed in Russia) who are being prosecuted for attempting to violently seize power and change the constitutional order of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR).

"I would not like to comment on the subject of swaps in any way. It is rather sensitive. It is difficult, painstaking work and it should be kept quiet," the Kremlin official said, replying to a request to comment on Podolyak’s statement.

On June 14, a trial to bring Azov battalion members to justice began in the Southern District Military Court in Rostov. Initially, 24 people were to be tried but two of them were swapped. Eight women who worked as cooks on the premises of the Azovstal steel works in Mariupol are also among the accused.

Additionally, the defendants include those Azov members who in the spring of 2022 gathered information about the location of DPR and Russian allied forces, passed it on to plan bombardments as well as fired an AK-74M assault rifle at the positions of DPR and Russian allied forces. Some of them were plotting to invade new DPR territories outside of their control, monitor checkpoints, and protect and defend their military camp as well as the DPR’s occupied territories. They were detained as they were attempting to leave the combat zone in the vicinity of the steel works.