MOSCOW, November 2. /TASS/. The Russian Defense Ministry offered to hand over 935 Ukrainian prisoners of war this year, but Kiev took only 279 of them, Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said.
"This year, the Russian Defense Ministry handed over to the Coordination Headquarters for the Handling of Prisoners of War a proposal to give back 935 Ukrainian prisoners of war to the Ukrainian side as part of exchanges," the diplomat said in an online news conference. "How many of this number of people do you think the Kiev regime took back? I will emphasize they are its own citizens. Only 279."
"These are practically 700 people who could have returned to their families in Ukraine," Zakharova went on to say. "They were simply shrugged off by the Kiev regime, and yet its representatives continue to travel to Canada and around the world and supposedly call on, and negotiate with the international community for mediation efforts and, as [former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry] Kuleba said, for protection of Ukrainian nationals in Russia."
The spokeswoman called such actions of the Kiev regime "political tourism on the blood of its own citizens, its own servicemen."
"Not those who have been experiencing hatred for years, not the thugs who are ready to kill everyone with weapons in their hands - both Russian citizens and residents of the African continent, as it now turns out, but those whom they literally forcibly mobilized, telling them that Ukraine must be saved, sending them into these human wave attacks. They are not interested in their fate," Zakharova said.