ROSTOV-ON-DON, July 23. /ITAR-TASS/. Ukraine decided to collect 18 out of 22 wounded servicemen from a Russian hospital on Wednesday. Members of Ukraine’s National Guard who had tried to break the encirclement set up by militias of the Donetsk People’s Republic for two days surrendered themselves to the Russian border guards on July 16. They appeared near the Ukrainian border post Chervonopartizansk, near the Russian village of Gukovo, with a white flag.

Guided by the principles of humanism, the Russian side agreed to accept the wounded guards for treatment without delay.

“A Russian Foreign Ministry representative in the Rostov region said the Russian and Ukrainian sides had settled all the formalities linked to the servicemen’s handover to Ukraine’s general consulate in the Rostov region,” Alexander Titov, an employee of the government’s information policy department, told ITAR-TASS.

Ukraine’s Antonov-26 (An-26) plane is expected to take 18 wounded and the body of a dead Ukrainian trooper from Rostov-on-Don back home to Ukraine.

Russia has acted in full compliance with the 1993 Minsk Convention on Legal Assistance and the 1993 Consular Convention between Russia and Ukraine.

Four seriously wounded Ukrainian servicemen who are not suitable for transportation are remaining in Russia. The Rostov regional authorities hope that Ukraine will find means to compensate the expenses to the Rostov hospital.

“There is no reason why we should obstruct the return of Ukrainian servicemen. It is in our interests because their daily stay, meals and treatment costs quite a sum to the regional budget. We hope that the Ukrainian side will be able to compensate financial expenses for complicated surgical operations done to its servicemen to the budget of the Rostov region,” Vice-Governor Vadim Artyomov said.

The wounded National Guard fighters are sharing one hospital with their enemies - the militias of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.

An OSCE mission that visited the guards in the hospital received the fragments of artillery shells as gifts.

The national guards are grateful to Russian doctors who fought for their lives. Now, the guards are wondering what will happen to them after they return to Ukraine.

“I do not think that I have done anything wrong. We asked shelter from a party, with which we are not at war, exclusively for treatment. We did not break our military oath. We were just fulfilling our line of duty,” Ivan Satsik, who is suffering from brain contusion, said.