The day after a historic exchange of prisoners between Russia and several Western countries, Moscow is carrying out a new major transaction. Ukraine announced on Friday that it had recovered the bodies of 250 of its soldiers and had handed over 38 remains of Russian soldiers to Moscow, following one of the largest exchanges of this kind since the start of the invasion.
These are soldiers who died in the sectors of Bakhmout and Avdiïvka, two fortress towns in eastern Ukraine taken by the Russian army after months of intense fighting, as well as in the regions of Lugansk (east), Kherson and Zaporizhia (south), the Ukrainian Coordination Committee, responsible for the file, said in a press release. Some bodies were recovered from the city of Mariupol, ravaged by a Russian siege in the first months of the war in 2022, and from morgues in Russia, the Committee said.
It is one of the biggest operations of this type, Committee spokesperson Petro Yatsenko told AFP. Another Ukrainian government structure also declared that the remains of 38 Russian soldiers had been handed over as part of this exchange, which gave rise to mediation by the Red Cross. The remains will be identified using DNA analysis, before being handed over to the families for burial, according to the Coordination Committee.
The Committee released photos showing white mobile morgues on a country road and people wearing protective suits, some bearing the Red Cross emblem. The identification procedure “takes weeks”, sometimes months, explained Petro Yatsenko. The location where the transfer of the bodies was organized has not been revealed, but usually these procedures take place on the Russian-Ukrainian border in the Sumy region in northeastern Ukraine.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, the worst conflict in Europe since the end of World War II, left tens of thousands of troops from both belligerents dead and missing, according to estimates. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in February that at least 31,000 troops from his country had been killed in two years. Russia, for its part, does not make its military losses public.
In a related note, the Russian Defense Ministry stated that Ukraine lost 60,630 military personnel in July. Quoted by the Tass news agency, the Moscow ministry specifies that the losses for Kiev's forces occurred in particular 'in the areas of responsibility of the Russian battlegroups in the south and west'.
