Moscow evokes an exchange of Ukrainian prisoners for a close friend of Putin

Russia will study the possibility of exchanging fighters from the Ukrainian Azov regiment taken prisoner for Viktor Medvedchuk, a close associate of Vladimir Putin, said Saturday a deputy and Russian negotiator, Leonid Sloutski.

To discover

• Follow information on the war in Ukraine with the Figaro application

Read alsoThe war in Ukraine pushes Europe to beef up its cyber strategy

"We are going to study the question

," said Mr. Sloutski, a member of the Russian delegation during the last negotiations with Kiev, quoted by the Ria Novosti press agency, in response to a question about such an exchange.

Speaking from the separatist city of Donetsk, in southeastern Ukraine, he said the possibility of such an exchange will be raised in Moscow by

.

Viktor Medvedchuk, 67, is a well-known Ukrainian politician and businessman close to the Russian president who was arrested in mid-April in Ukraine, while he had been on the run since the start of the Kremlin offensive in late February.

Viktor Medvedchuk had been under house arrest since May 2021 after being charged with

and

, the Ukrainian peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.

On Friday, the Russian army announced that the last Ukrainian defenders of the strategic city of Mariupol, holed up for weeks in the huge Azovstal steelworks, had surrendered.

Among them are members of the Azov regiment, an ultranationalist unit that the Kremlin considers "neo-Nazi", and that kyiv hopes to free in exchange for Russian prisoners.

On May 26, the Russian Supreme Court must consider a request to classify the regiment as a "terrorist organization", which could complicate an exchange of these prisoners.

The leader of the Donetsk separatists, Denis Pushilin, said on Saturday that the Ukrainian soldiers who had defended the Azovstal factory and had surrendered should be tried.

," said Denis Pouchiline, quoted by Ria Novosti, during the press conference where Leonid Sloutski also spoke.