The unified register of people missing under special circumstances in Ukraine currently contains information on 37,000 citizens, Ukrinform reported, citing of Ukrainian ombudsman Dmytro Lyubinets, BTA reported.
"We currently have a unified register of people who have disappeared under special circumstances. It is in the process of being filled with information and according to the latest report I received yesterday, there are now more than 37,000 Ukrainian citizens on the list,", the ombudsman noted at an event in Kyiv.
According to him, it concerns adult civilians, children, as well as military personnel. According to him, the number of people on the list will grow. Separately, Lyubinets pointed out that Russia has been kidnapping and imprisoning Ukrainian civilians since the beginning of its armed aggression, that is, since 2014.
According to the ombudsman, the Russians are violating international humanitarian laws because there is a direct provision in the Geneva Convention, namely - Article 3, which prohibits warring parties from taking civilians as hostages.
"There is a provision, but the Russian Federation continues to do it. And the problem, probably, is that they did not suffer any consequences for violating this norm," said the human rights representative of the Verkhovna Rada. He noted that over the past 10 years, the Russian Federation has not provided any information about the civilians it holds.
The Ukrainian ombudsman stated that the authorities repeatedly used their channels to communicate with the Russian side, in particular, he personally had contacts with his Russian colleague Tatyana Moskalkova, during which the issue of detained civilians was repeatedly raised. "Unfortunately, this has not led to any results so far. Precisely because we cannot get any information from Russia, we do not see the exact number of the aggressor illegally detained by the state," Lubinets pointed out. According to him, no one can say, even in theory, how long it will take the Ukrainian authorities to return all the civilians who are currently in Russian captivity, because now the necessary tools to achieve this result do not exist.