“During the period of Minsk agreement implementation 2894 people were released. Following the Minsk agreements, we negotiate; but at the same time, the president ordered to get people back by any means. No one can deny get back the wounded guys. And literally every day we find our boys,” stated Yuriy Tandit, advisor to the Security Service Chairman, in his latest interview with Insider.
He added that there were some cases when Ukrainians liberated foreigners from Russian-backed militants’ captivity. “Once we managed to release the foreign students kept by Motorola. They were studetns of Luhansk medical university, who were cut off from everything. Students even did not have their credit cards, and they had to eat fruit from the trees,” said Tandit.
Advisor to the Security Service Chairman also stated that near 200 people are still captured.
Arseniy Pavlov, better known as Motorola, is Russian citizen leading the Sparta Battalion, militants fighting the Ukrainian government, in the ongoing Donbas conflict. Previously he was a car cleaner in Russia and it was his main source of income, before he went to Ukraine.