Moscow has retrieved the remains of 27 of its service members, Vladimir Medinsky, the top negotiator for talks with Kiev, has confirmed
Russia has handed over to Ukraine the remains of 1,212 soldiers killed in combat, Vladimir Medinsky, Moscow’s top negotiator for talks with Kiev, has confirmed. Moscow earlier agreed to return to Ukraine the remains of over 6,000 Ukrainian soldiers, but accused Kiev of being unwilling to accept them.
The transfer of fallen troops was initially announced by Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War on Wednesday. It said the service members had died while fighting on the front line in Russia’s Kursk, Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, as well as Ukraine’s Kharkov Region. Officials provided no names or personal details of the deceased.
Medinsky later confirmed the start of the exchange process, noting that Russia has received 27 bodies of deceased service members. “Now they can be buried in a Christian manner,” he said in a statement on Telegram.
He added that Moscow and Kiev would begin urgent “sanitary exchanges” involving seriously wounded POWs. “Russia does not abandon its own people,” Medinsky stated.
Moscow decided to return the bodies of over 6,000 Ukrainian soldiers during talks with Kiev in Istanbul earlier this month. However, while Russia completed the delivery of the bodies to the designated exchange areas, Ukraine rescheduled the meeting without prior notice, and their representatives were nowhere to be found, Medinsky said at the time.
Despite this, Russian Lieutenant General Aleksandr Zorin, who was part of Moscow’s negotiating team, signaled that the country was fully ready to honor the agreement, saying “it is a purely humanitarian action. Not the first of such kind and, regrettably, not the last one.”
As part of the Istanbul process, Russia and Ukraine have also agreed to conduct several POW exchanges. The exchanges have continued after the second round of talks, with the total number of soldiers estimated at between 1,000 and 1,200 in the latest swap, according to Medinsky.
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