According to the Unified Register of Missing Persons, there are about 24,000 civilian hostages from Ukraine in Russia, Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian parliament's commissioner for human rights, has said.
"I emphasised that according to the Unified Register of Missing Persons, which was launched on 2 May this year, there are approximately 24,000 civilian hostages in Russia," he said at a meeting with relatives of prisoners of war and missing military units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the National Guard of Ukraine, the State Border Guard Service and other formations from Dnipro and Zaporizhzhya regions, which took place in Dnipro.
Lubinets also spoke about communication with Russian ombudsman Tatiana Moskalkova, the refusal of the Russian side to conduct an "all-for-all" exchange, the repatriation of the seriously wounded and the return of civilians.
"I noted that the Russians are delaying the exchange process in order to negatively influence the relatives of prisoners of war against Ukraine as a state," Lubinets said.
As of the beginning of May, a total of 2,324 Ukrainians have been released from Russian captivity.