The Russian Ministry of Justice has filed a lawsuit to the Russian Supreme Court with a request to recognise Ukraine’s Azov battalion as a terrorist organisation and ban its activity in the country, the ministry’s website informs.
The Supreme Court will consider the lawsuit on 26 May.
Earlier today, Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the Russian State Duma (lower house of parliament), supported the idea of Russian lawmaker Anatoly Vasserman to prohibit the exchange of prisoners from Ukraine’s Azov battalion for Russian prisoners of war. “Nazi criminals cannot be exchanged. They are war criminals and we must do everything we can to make them stand trial,” Volodin said.
In turn, Russian lawmaker Leonid Slutsky proposed to lift the death penalty for the Azov fighters.
In the past 24 hours, 265 Ukrainian servicemen from the Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol surrendered to the Russian forces, including 51 seriously wounded soldiers, the Russian Defence Ministry reported.
Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister Hanna Malyar stated that Ukraine plans to hold a prisoner swap with Russia to return the Azovstal soldiers to Ukraine-controlled territory.
