ANKARA: Russia and Ukraine have agreed on an exchange of 40 prisoners of war each, Russian Human Rights Commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova said on Wednesday after meeting her Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Lubinets in Turkiye.
Moskalkova and Lubinets were meeting on the sidelines of an international ombudsman conference in Ankara. Photos showed them sitting on opposite sides of a table.
“It is very important that the ombudsmen of Ukraine and Russia, in the absence of diplomatic relations (between the two countries), take concrete actions to help people,” Moskalkova told reporters.
Russia and Ukraine have conducted numerous prisoner swaps — most recently on Sunday — amounting to hundreds of captives each in the course of the war, which is now in its 11th month.
Earlier, Moskalkova said on the Telegram messaging app that she and Lubinets had also discussed the issue of servicemen missing on both sides, and civilian humanitarian issues.
She said she had asked Lubinets to help Ukrainian citizens who want to visit relatives in Russia.
Given the current difficulty of establishing humanitarian corridors inside Ukraine, she said the ombudsmen should help specific people to move between regions and countries, saying Turkiye could play an important role.
Separately, Russia’s state-owned RIA news agency quoted Moskalkova as saying “important words about the need for a cease-fire” in Ukraine had been spoken during her meeting with her Ukrainian and Turkish colleagues.
Moskalkova said a cease-fire was necessary to stop human rights violations, RIA reported. She also asked Turkiye, a NATO ally, to stop supplying arms to Ukraine.
As Moskalkova and Lubinets met in Ankara, a fierce battle was raging for the small town of Soledar in eastern Ukraine.
Both were later due to visit the Turkish presidential palace, where President Tayyip Erdogan was scheduled to make a speech for the conference.
Ukraine and Russia agree on a prisoner swap
https://arab.news/yeup3
Ukraine and Russia agree on a prisoner swap
- Russia and Ukraine have conducted numerous prisoner swaps — most recently on Sunday — amounting to hundreds of captives each
Only 4% women on ballot as Bangladesh prepares for post-Hasina vote
- Women PMs have ruled Bangladesh for over half of its independent history
- For 2026 vote, only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates
DHAKA: As Bangladesh prepares for the first election since the ouster of its long-serving ex-prime minister Sheikh Hasina, only 4 percent of the registered candidates are women, as more than half of the political parties did not field female candidates.
The vote on Feb. 12 will bring in new leadership after an 18-month rule of the caretaker administration that took control following the student-led uprising that ended 15 years in power of Hasina’s Awami League party.
Nearly 128 million Bangladeshis will head to the polls, but while more than 62 million of them are women, the percentage of female candidates in the race is incomparably lower, despite last year’s consensus reached by political parties to have at least 5 percent women on their lists.
According to the Election Commission, among 1,981 candidates only 81 are women, in a country that in its 54 years of independence had for 32 years been led by women prime ministers — Hasina and her late rival Khaleda Zia.
According to Dr. Rasheda Rawnak Khan from the Department of Anthropology at Dhaka University, women’s political participation was neither reflected by the rule of Hasina nor Zia.
“Bangladesh has had women rulers, not women’s rule,” Khan told Arab News. “The structure of party politics in Bangladesh is deeply patriarchal.”
Only 20 out of 51 political parties nominated female candidates for the 2026 vote. Percentage-wise, the Bangladesh Socialist Party was leading with nine women, or 34 percent of its candidates.
The election’s main contender, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, whose former leader Zia in 1991 became the second woman prime minister of a predominantly Muslim nation — after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto — was the party that last year put forward the 5 percent quota for women.
For the upcoming vote, however, it ended up nominating only 10 women, or 3.5 percent of its 288 candidates.
The second-largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami, has not nominated a single woman.
The 4 percent participation is lower than in the previous election in 2024, when it was slightly above 5 percent, but there was no decreasing trend. In 2019, the rate was 5.9 percent, and 4 percent in 2014.
“We have not seen any independent women’s political movement or institutional activities earlier, from where women could now participate in the election independently,” Khan said.
“Real political participation is different and difficult as well in this patriarchal society, where we need to establish internal party democracy, protection from political violence, ensure direct election, and cultural shifts around female leadership.”
While the 2024 student-led uprising featured a prominent presence of women activists, Election Commission data shows that this has not translated into their political participation, with very few women contesting the upcoming polls.
“In the student movement, women were recruited because they were useful, presentable for rallies and protests both on campus and in the field of political legitimacy. Women were kept at the forefront for exhibiting some sort of ‘inclusive’ images to the media and the people,” Khan said.
“To become a candidate in the general election, one needs to have a powerful mentor, money, muscle power, control over party people, activists, and locals. Within the male-dominated networks, it’s very difficult for women to get all these things.”
