Kyiv announced on Friday that it had received the bodies of hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers killed during battles with Russia, marking the largest repatriation of its fallen troops in more than three years of war.
The exchange of prisoners and the return of soldiers’ remains remain among the few areas of cooperation between Moscow and Kyiv since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The repatriation, which involved the return of 909 fallen defenders, underscores the severe toll and intensity of the ongoing conflict. The Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, a government body, confirmed the return in a statement shared on social media.
“We are grateful for the assistance of the International Committee of the Red Cross,” the statement read.
The remains were returned from the Donetsk, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhia regions—territories the Kremlin claims as part of Russia. Some of the bodies had been returned from “morgues on the territory of the Russian Federation,” likely referring to soldiers killed during Ukraine’s ongoing offensive in the Russian region of Kursk.
This repatriation marks at least the seventh such exchange since last October, involving more than 500 Ukrainian bodies each time.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has previously stated that over 46,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed, with more than 380,000 wounded since the war began.
In contrast, Russia has not publicly acknowledged the return of its fallen soldiers or provided current casualty figures, though Russian media cited officials claiming that only 43 Russian soldiers’ remains had been repatriated.
AFP
