DONETSK, January 23. /TASS/. Chief Executive and Prime Minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, Alexander Zakharchenko, is mulling an order to stop taking Ukrainian military prisoner, Donetsk News Agency said on Friday.
This order will come about as Zakharchenko’s response to the shelling of a bus stop in Donetsk on Thursday, which claimed the lives of eight people and left another seventeen people wounded.
“Following this tragedy, I’m considering an order to take no more prisoners of war because we don’t need exchanges,” he said.
Zakharchenko apportioned blame for the shelling of the bus stop to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
“The deaths of these people lie at your door because it was you who gave the order to your military to open gunfire at urban areas and now they are killing our children and the elderly,” Zakharchenko said in an address to Poroshenko in absentia.
“We’re capable of pushing your armed units away from our cities and we can thus stop the shelling of population centers in the Donetsk People’s Republic by the Ukrainian Army,” he said.