Chairman of the Russian State Duma (lower house of parliament) International Affairs Committee Leonid Slutsky has proposed to lift the death penalty for the fighters of Ukraine’s Azov battalion, he wrote on his Telegram channel.
“If their monstrous crimes against humanity are proven, I would like to repeat my proposal to
make an exemption from the moratorium on the death penalty in Russia
and to enable the court to consider the possibility of capital punishment,” Slutsky wrote in response to a statement by State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, who earlier offered to prohibit the exchange of captured Azov soldiers 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.
Russian lawmaker Anatoly Vasserman voiced this proposal during the State Duma session on Tuesday. He stated that those who “were directly involved in the killings of civilians,” as well as those “who covered themselves in fascist tattoos” cannot be exchanged.
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. According to her, 53 badly wounded soldiers were taken to “DPR”-controlled Novoazovsk, while another 211 were evacuated through a humanitarian corridor to Olenivka, a village in Crimea.
According to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the Ukrainian military leadership ordered the commanders of the units remaining at Azovstal to preserve the life of the soldiers.
