Moscow tells Hamas to ‘keep promises’ on release of hostages Alexander Trufanov, Maxim Herkin

A deputy Russian foreign minister has met with a senior Hamas official in Moscow and urged the Palestinian terror group to keep “promises” to release two Israeli hostages, according to the ministry.

Mikhail Bogdanov, who is also Russian President Vladimir Putin’s special envoy on the Middle East, met with Moussa Abu Marzuk, a senior member of Hamas’s political bureau.

Russia has called for the release of dual Russian-Israeli citizen Alexander “Sasha” Trufanov and Maxim Herkin, an Israeli man from the Donbas area of Ukraine who has Russian relatives.

At their talks, Bogdanov “again placed particular stress on the necessity of carrying out the promises given by Hamas’s leadership on releasing from imprisonment Russian citizen Trufanov and other hostages,” the ministry says.

Trufanov was abducted on October 7, 2023, with his girlfriend, Sapir Cohen, from their home on Kibbutz Nir Oz near the Gaza border. His father was killed in the brutal Hamas attack, and his mother and grandmother were abducted and released in November 2023. The family emigrated from Russia to Israel in the late 1990s.

Herkin immigrated to Israel from Ukraine with his mother. He was kidnapped from the Supernova rave music festival on October 7, 2023.

Earlier today, Abu Marzuk told Russia’s RIA Novosti news agency that Trufanov would “definitely be released in the near future… in the first stage of the deal,” while talks on releasing Herkin would be held at a “second stage.”

The Russian ministry says the two also discussed “the progress of the ceasefire agreement in the Gaza Strip, with the stress on the importance of increasing humanitarian aid to the suffering Palestinian population.”