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More than 400 persons today are considered missing, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine reported citing data collected by the United Center for the coordination of search and release of persons illegally deprived of liberty, hostages, and location of those declared missing in action across the zone of the Anti-Terrorist Operation in the east of Ukraine.
The statement released by the ministry’s press service on the occasion of International Day of the Disappeared says that the search for the missing and the identification of bodies of those killed as a result of Russia’s armed aggression against Ukraine in Donbass remains one of the most painful humanitarian problems requiring urgent action.
"The search becomes impossible because of the obstacles that the Russian-terrorist forces are imposing, their systematic restrictions of access for international humanitarian organizations to the territory of certain [occupied] areas of Donetsk and Luhansk regions," the statement said.
The Foreign Ministry stressed that among the numerous violations of human rights by Russia in the occupied Crimea, "the abductions and disappearances of Ukrainians and Crimean Tatars who are being persecuted by the occupation authorities for their political or civil views cause most indignation."
Read alsoKyiv lodges with ECHR some 4,000 suits related to Donbas, Crimea"The Ukrainian side is deeply grateful to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as a neutral mediator for their active participation in solving the problem of missing persons and providing support to their families. We hope that the ICRC’s important humanitarian mission will continue, in particular in the occupied territories, to which the Ukrainian side temporarily has no access," the statement says.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin wrote on Twitter that he would discuss with his Belarusian counterpart Vladzimir Makey in Budapest Thursday the situation regarding the disappearance on the territory of Belarus of a 19-year-old Ukrainian citizen Pavlo Hryb.
As UNIAN reported earlier, the young Ukrainian, son of a member of the Public Council of the Ukrainian State Border Guard Service has disappeared in Belarus on August 24 after he went for a date with his online acquaintance.
Read alsoRussia's FSB reportedly lures Ukraine border service official's son into Belarus for datingThe girl, in the young man's words, had to come for a meeting from the Russian Federation to the city of Gomel in Belarus. He was supposed to return home the same day.
When he did not come back, his father went to Gomel where he learnt that the young man was on the wanted list under Article 205 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (terrorist act), while the initiator of the search is Russia's FSB in Krasnodar Krai (the city of Sochi).
Ihor Hryb turned to the Gomel border department with the request about his son's whereabouts.
On August 29, the Ukrainian foreign ministry reported that Belarus authorities had not confirmed taking into custody of the Ukrainian citizen.
Some media outlets suggest that Pavlo Hryb may have been illegally transported from Belarus to Russia’s Krasnodar Krai where he is now held in the FSB’s detention facility after he has been lured to Belarus with a help of an accomplice with whom Pavlo chatted into a romantic relationship, or so he thought.