KIEV, July 21 /TASS/. A working group for humanitarian issues of the Contact Group for Ukraine Settlement has agreed to allow the International Red Cross to escort convicts from the militia-held areas to the Kiev-controlled territory in Ukraine, Irina Gerashchenko, Ukraine’s representative in the trilateral contact group, wrote on Facebook on Tuesday.

"We agreed that the Red Cross (the International Committee of the Red Cross) can join an international procedure of escorting convicts who are serving their prison sentences as a monitoring mission," Gerashchenko said adding that she meant prisons and penitentiaries located in the militia-held territory of the Donbas region.

She said that the agreement concerned 10,000 prisoners who had been convicted by Ukrainian courts prior to the start of the security operation in Donbas. "Out of those inmates, about a thousand want to serve the remaining prison terms in other penitentiaries located in territories controlled by the Ukraine government," Gerashchenko said.