Russia May Swap Ukraine Prisoners for Putin’s Ally Medvedchuk

Russia could exchange prisoners from Ukraine's Azov battalion for the “dark prince” of Ukrainian politics, Viktor Medvedchuk, close to President Vladimir Putin.

"We are going to study the possibility," Leonid Slutsky, a senior member of Russia's negotiating team on Ukraine said Saturday, speaking from the separatist city of Donetsk in southeastern Ukraine, reports said, citing state-owned RIA Novosti.

Medvedchuk, 67, is a politician and one of Ukraine's richest people and is known for his close ties to Putin. He escaped from house arrest after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February but was re-arrested in mid-April. It was then that Ukraine’s leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video address on Telegram, “I propose to Russia to exchange this man of yours for our boys and our girls who are now in Russian captivity.”

The Kremlin responded to the re-arrest by claiming that Putin has no special relationship with Medvedchuk. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov at first suggested the photographs of Medvedchuk in full military camouflage and handcuffs could be fakes.

He added that Medvedchuk “has never had any behind the scenes relations with Russia.” If he did, Peskov claimed, he would have left Ukraine before the war began.

The wealthy businessman had been a loyal ally to Putin for two decades, leading a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine for years, even after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the beginning of the deadly war in Donbas.

“They [the Kremlin] viewed him as the main guy in Ukraine, their main interlocutor in Ukraine,” a former Russian official, who knows Medvedchuk personally, told The Guardian. “[Medvedchuk] was the legitimate way they could see their future influence [in Ukraine] … his ‘persecution’ is when this all began.”