kyiv and Moscow exchange remains of nearly 300 soldiers killed in combat

After the release of prisoners between Russia and several Western countries, kyiv is also carrying out an exchange of a rarely seen scale – this time of soldiers’ remains. Ukraine announced on Friday, August 2, that it had recovered the bodies of 250 of its soldiers who had fallen in combat, and had handed over to Moscow 38 remains of Russian soldiers, at the end of one of the largest exchanges of this kind since the beginning of the invasion.

The soldiers involved in the exchange died in the areas of Bakhmut and Avdiivka, 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 Zaporizhzhia (south), the Ukrainian Coordination Committee, which is in charge of the case, said in a statement. 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.

Another Ukrainian government body also said that the remains of 38 Russian servicemen had been handed over as part of the exchange, which was mediated by the Red Cross. “It’s one of the biggest” operations of this type, the spokesperson of the Committee stressed to AFP. The remains will be identified using DNA analysis, before being handed over to the families for burial, according to the Coordination Committee.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the worst conflict in Europe since the end of World War II, has left tens of thousands of troops on both sides dead or missing, according to estimates. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in February that at least 31,000 of his country’s troops had been killed in two years. Russia, for its part, does not make its military losses public.