The bodies of 1,212 Ukrainian soldiers have been returned from Russia, Kyiv says, as part of a prisoner exchange agreement between the warring countries.
In return Russia received 27 bodies, Moscow’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said.
The prisoner exchange deal was the only tangible result of peace talks in Turkey last week, with both sides agreeing to hand over as many as 6,000 dead bodies each, as well as sick and heavily wounded prisoners of war, and those aged under 25.
Medinsky announced that Russia would begin exchanging “severely wounded prisoners” on Thursday.
The dead soldiers were from various regions of Ukraine, including Donetsk, Kharkiv, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine’s co-ordination centre for the treatment of prisoners of war said on Telegram.
The centre added it would “establish the identities of the deceased as soon as possible”.
This is not the first time that dead bodies have been repatriated in this conflict – thousands have already been exchanged in more than 70 separate repatriations.
This exchange follows several days of accusations from Moscow that Ukraine was failing to collect the bodies, which Medinsky said had been sitting in refrigerated trucks at an exchange point since Saturday.
Medinsky also said on Saturday that Ukraine had “unexpectedly postponed” the prisoner swaps. In response, Ukraine said that Russia was playing “dirty tricks” and manipulating the facts.
The first round of exchanges took place on Monday. There were emotional scenes as the families of missing Ukrainian soldiers gathered near the border with Belarus to press the returning prisoners for information about their loved ones.
Soldiers on both sides were exchanged that day, but neither Russia nor Ukraine gave an exact number of how many people were swapped.
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