Militants block removal of Ukrainian soldiers' bodies from Donbas
kiev/ Ukraine in Arabic/ Kremlin-backed militants do not allow a corridor for the Ukrainian 'Black Tulip' volunteer organization to remove Ukrainian soldiers' dead bodies from the Donbas conflict zone, Yaroslav Zhylkin, the chairman of NGO Narodna Pamyat.
"Well, apparently something is going to happen there [in Donbas], we haven't been given a corridor," he wrote. Zhylkin said it was not a typical situation for volunteers.
"It has rarely happened to us. Even during the siege of the Donetsk airport and the town of Debaltseve, we were able to get there," he said.
Black Tulip (Cargo 200 Evacuation), a Ukrainian volunteer organization, was set up in September 2014 as a joint civil and military cooperation project of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, the National Museum of Military History of Ukraine and NGO Narodna Pamyat Union. About 120 volunteers from different regions of Ukraine have been involved in the mission.
As of the end of February 2015, volunteers had withdrawn 390 dead bodies of Ukrainian troops from the Anti-Terrorist Operation zone in eastern Ukraine.
