Kyiv announced on Friday that it had recovered the bodies of more than 900 Ukrainian soldiers killed in combat with Russian forces, marking the second major repatriation of war dead in just three weeks.
The exchange of prisoners of war and fallen soldiers remains one of the few areas of limited cooperation between Ukraine and Russia since the full-scale invasion began in 2022.
“As a result of repatriation efforts, the bodies of 909 fallen Ukrainian defenders were returned to Ukraine,” the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, a Ukrainian government agency, said in a statement on social media.
Russia, for its part, rarely provides official updates on its casualties or details of body repatriations. However, according to Russian media and military bloggers, the remains of 41 Russian soldiers were returned in the latest exchange, citing Shamsail Saraliev, a member of the State Duma’s committee overseeing the war effort.
The exchange came amid growing signs that US-led diplomatic efforts to broker a ceasefire have stalled.
Casualties on both sides are believed to be extensive, though neither Kyiv nor Moscow regularly discloses up-to-date figures. In a February interview with NBC News, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed that more than 46,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed and approximately 380,000 wounded since the war began.
Russia has not publicly updated its casualty figures since the fall of 2022, when it reported fewer than 6,000 deaths — a number widely disputed by independent analysts.
According to an ongoing investigation by Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian Service, the identities of nearly 100,000 Russian soldiers killed in action have been confirmed using open-source data, including obituaries, regional media reports, and social media posts.
