LUGANSK, December 31. /TASS/. Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) prefers to fabricate charges against innocent people instead of exposing and chasing real spies, 85-year-old scholar Mekhti Logunov, of Kharkov, has said. The man, released within the framework of the exchange of held persons between Kiev and Donbass on Sunday, added that he had a chance to see for himself what he described as criminal activities by Ukrainian law enforcement authorities and special services.

"In 2014 and 2015 I spent a long time on, as I call it, Dzerzhinsky Square [renamed as Svobody Square, central Kharkov — TASS] to gain first-hand experience of what was happening there," the Lugansk Media Center news agency quotes Logunov as saying. "I was gathering facts for a book I’m still writing. I’m going to call it A History of the Revolution of Dignity in Kharkov. Naturally, I was meeting people and talking to them, I was watching what was going on and recording videos and taking pictures. I was going to use all that content in my book."

Logunov stressed that he by no means participated in any rallies or mass unrest in Kharkov in those days.

"There is nothing I can be charged with. I did nothing that might be interpreted as legal abuse. But law and the security service SBU are incompatible notions," Logunov claimed. "I was brought to the SBU office. During cross examination I was told that I was suspected of spying for Russia."

"I looked at them [interrogators] as fools, because the fake charges I was a Russian intelligence station chief were preposterous and laughable," Logunov said.

The first major exchange of held persons between the Donbass republics and Kiev over the past two years took place at the Gorlovka checkpoint. The Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics released 76 persons to Kiev and welcomed back 124 in the exchange.