Ukraine says Russia returned 1,000 bodies

Russia on Thursday returned 1,000 bodies to Ukraine, which Moscow said were the remains of Kyiv’s soldiers killed in battle, a Ukrainian government agency said. Moscow later confirmed the exchange, saying it had received 31 bodies from Kyiv. The exchange of prisoners of war and the remains of dead soldiers is one of the few remaining areas of cooperation between Kyiv and Moscow, which invaded Ukraine in February 2022. “Repatriation measures took place today,” Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War announced on social media. “One thousand bodies, which according to the Russian side belong to Ukrainian servicemen, were returned to Ukraine,” the agency added. Ukraine has said that Moscow handed over to Kyiv the bodies of Russian soldiers during previous repatriations. Kyiv also announced in September, August and July that it had received the remains of 1,000 soldiers from Russia, illustrating the intensity of fighting across the sprawling front line. The Coordination Headquarters said law enforcement would soon begin the process of identifying the repatriated remains. It thanked the International Committee of the Red Cross for its role in the repatriation. Tens of thousands of soldiers have been killed on both sides since Russia invaded, though neither side regularly publishes data on their own casualties. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in February this year told US media that Ukraine has lost more than 46,000 soldiers and that tens of thousands were considered missing in action. The BBC and independent outlet Mediazona say they have documented more than 135,000 Russian soldiers killed in the three-and-a-half-year campaign, using open-source data. They say the actual number likely higher.