by Our Foreign Desk

KIEV forces claimed yesterday to have captured two Russian soldiers in eastern Ukraine during a skirmish in the country’s civil war.

Ukrainian general staff spokesman Vladislav Seleznev said that the two men were wounded and taken prisoner near the front-line town of Shchastia in the Lugansk region on Sunday.

He said that they were being interrogated by the Ukrainian security service and were on their way to the capital to be paraded before the media.

A video posted by a Ukrainian MP purportedly showed one of the men, identified as Sergeant Alexander Alexandrov from the southern Russian city of Togliatti, named after the Italian communist leader.

A member of the Aidar battalion, which uses the neonazi 1488 symbol on its insignia, said that the wounded men had refused sedatives for fear of having their organs removed for sale.

But the Lugansk Information Centre said on Sunday that the men identified by Kiev as Russian officers were in fact local policemen.

Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “We have said repeatedly that there are no Russian troops in Donbass.”

Anti-fascist forces in the Russian-speaking Donbass region of eastern Ukraine have been fighting Kiev’s far-right militias since the Western-backed coup in the country last year.

Another Ukrainian military spokesman, Andriy Lysenko, said yesterday that the capture of the men meant that Russia could no longer deny its military presence in Ukraine.

“They were there on a mission and they were killing our people,” he said.

Ukrainian security service chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko said on Sunday that the two men “are facing criminal responsibility.”