The EU urged Ukraine and Russia to complete the exchange of prisoners by the end of 2018. The EU Permanent Mission in the OSCE tweeted this on Friday.
#EU encourages #Russia and #Ukraine to pursue exchange of detainees by the end of 2018. We welcome firm support for this path expressed by German Chancellor Merkel @ChancelleryGER, French President @EmmanuelMacron and Ukrainian President @poroshenko.
— EU at OSCE @EUOSCE November 15, 2018
Previously, Ukrainian leader Petro Poroshenko and his German and French counterparts Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron discussed the immediate return to the negotiations about exchanging and releasing Ukrainian political prisoners illegally held in Russia.
The last round of large-scale exchange of prisoners between Ukraine and the Russian militants in Donbas took place on December 27, 2017. Though the issue of exchange of prisoners is the subject of a lively discussion in Russia, the Kremlin has not been responding to Ukraine's requests in this regard.
In September, Leonid Kuchma, the former president of Ukraine and the ex-representative of this country in the Minsk tasks group said that there would be no progress in the POW exchange issue until 2019.
