Russia hands over data on five Americans captured in Vietnam to the US
Russia has given the US declassified archival information about five American pilots who were captured in Vietnam in the 1970s, Interfax reported, citing the Deputy Chief of the Defense Ministry of Russia for Perpetuating the Memory of those Killed in the Defense of the Fatherland, Andrei Taranov.
Taranov did not mention the names of the prisoners, nor did he specify whether the Americans were captured by Vietnamese or Soviet troops.
According to Taranov, the message was received with "great enthusiasm and appreciation" by members of the National League of POW/MIA Families of the Vietnam War. Earlier, the Russian delegation participated in the annual meeting of the League, at which the work of the Russian-American Commission for Prisoners of War and Missing Persons was discussed, as well as plans for the coming years.
Taranov noted that after the meeting the US announced its readiness "to develop mutually beneficial cooperation in every possible way" in matters of establishing the fate of prisoners of war.
Most of the American POWs were pilots. As noted by Interfax, the cabin of an American aircraft that had been shot down in 1972 in Vietnam had earlier been stored at the Moscow Aviation Institute. In 2002, Deputy Nikolai Bezborodov, then Deputy Chairman of the Defense Committee, did not rule out the possibility of "transferring American military pilots captured in Vietnam to the Soviet Union." At the same time, he noted, "there is no evidence of this".
The Vietnamese did not recognize the Americans as Prisoners of War, since North Vietnam and the United States did not formally fight. Americans talked about torture upon returning from captivity. According to the site militaryfactor, 116 US military members were killed in captivity in Vietnam.