“We planned to have a prisoner exchange on February 7, but we needed to postpone it to February 9-10. I cannot give any reasons of why right now,” Ivan Kopyl told RIA Novosti.
In the most recent December swap DPR released over 145 prisoners, with Kiev handing over 222 people. The next exchange was expected to be held in mid-January, according to the DPR envoy at the Minsk peace talks Denis Pushilin.
On January 22, DPR leader Alexander Zakharchenko said that the republic's authorities would no longer swap Ukrainian prisoners in an all-for-all format and would carry out a one-for-one exchange.
An all-for-all prisoner swap between Kiev and eastern Ukraine was agreed upon in September 2014 at a Contact Group meeting in Minsk, with the mediation of Russia and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).
