The Ukrainian border guard officers Bohdan Martson and Ihor Dziubak have been released from Russian captivity on March 2 after a swap for two Russian border guards, lawmaker Iryna Gerashchenko announced on her Facebook page.
“I congratulate those mums, wives, children, families of Ihor and Bohdan,” Gerashchenko, Ukraine’s representative in humanitarian part of Minsk peace negotiations, wrote while posting the smiling photo of them.
A swap took place at the Ukraine-Russia border crossing point of Hoptivka in Kharkiv Oblast, according to Interfax news agency.
Martson and Dziubak disappeared on Oct. 3, 2017 while serving in Sumy Oblast, and later Russian officials confirmed they had been detained, without disclosing details.
On March, 2 they were exchanged for two Russian border guards Volodymyr Kuznietsov and Askar Kalub, who had been arrested in June 2017 in the south of Kherson Oblast.
Ukrainian soldiers found them after they arrived by boat from Russian-annexed Crimea to the mainland part of Ukraine. According to Ukrainian border guards, they had no papers and claimed they participated in the exercises for searching the border trespassers but got lost.
Petro Tsyhykal, head of Ukraine’s State Border Service told the interview to Ukrainski Novyny in October that Russians probably kidnapped the two Ukrainian border guards to later swap them for Kuznietsov and Kalub.
President Petro Poroshenko announced the release of two Ukrainians from Russian prisons at his press conference on Feb. 28.
However, after the big prisoner swap held in December 2017, the prisoner exchange between Ukraine and Russian-occupied parts of Donbas have been stalled, Gerashchenko earlier said.
