KIEV,
Ukraine — Two Russian officers captured while fighting in war-torn
eastern Ukraine are being transported to the capital, Kiev, a Ukrainian
military spokesman said Monday.
The
Russians were wounded and taken prisoner near the front line town of
Shchastia in the Luhansk region on Sunday, Ukrainian officials reported.
Russia-backed
separatists in eastern Ukraine have been fighting government troops for
a year, and Russia has vehemently denied it is supplying them either
with weaponry or troops. When several Russian soldiers were captured on
Ukrainian territory last summer, Russian President Vladimir Putin said
they had simply got lost.
Vladislav
Seleznev, spokesman for the Ukrainian General Staff, told The
Associated Press on Monday that the two men are now being questioned by
the Ukrainian Security Service and are on their way to Kiev where they
will face the media.
A video posted by a member of parliament on Sunday showed one man who said he was a Russian Army sergeant.
The
young man was shown lying in a hospital bed and introduced himself as
Sgt. Alexander Alexandrov of the Russian Special Forces from the Volga
River city of Togliatti. He said he was operating in the area in a group
consisting of 14 men and had been based in the rebel stronghold Luhansk
since March 6.
He and his comrades had been rotating in and out of the area around Shchastia every four to five days, he said.
Moscow on Monday denied the reports.
"We
have said repeatedly that there are no Russian troops in Donbass,"
Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, referring to eastern Ukraine, when
asked about the video released by Kiev.
The
separatist mouthpiece Luhansk Information Center on Sunday said the men
identified by Ukraine as Russian officers were in fact two policemen
from Luhansk who had been taken prisoner near Shchastia.
More
than 6,100 people have been killed in the conflict, which has left
large parts of Ukraine's industrial heartlands in ruins. A cease-fire
brokered by Russia and Western nations in February has made the fighting
less intense and deadly but the skirmishes between the separatists and
Ukrainian troops are still a daily occurrence.
Grigory
Maksimets, a medic of the pro-Kiev volunteer Aidar battalion, told the
AP that he attended to the men when they were delivered late on Saturday
to his hospital in Shchastia, a town less than 20 kilometers north of
Luhansk and home to a strategic power station.
One
man had been wounded in the shoulder and the other one in the right
leg, said Maksimets, who works in intensive care. The men were caught by
Ukrainian troops while on a reconnaissance mission around the power
station, he said.
The
men both introduced themselves as Russian officers and were worried
that the battalion's doctors wanted to take their organs for sale, he
added.
"They
asked not to be sedated because they were afraid we would take their
organs," Maksimets told the AP, adding their Russian commanders had
warned them about this.
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