On Saturday, June 14, Ukraine carried out another stage of body repatriation under the agreements reached in Istanbul. Ukraine received 1,200 more bodies, which, according to the Russian side, may belong to Ukrainian citizens, including military personnel.
In the coming days, law enforcement officers together with Interior Ministry experts will carry out the necessary examinations and identification procedures, according to the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War.
Yesterday, Kyiv Post reported that the bodies of 1,200 more Ukrainians, including fallen defenders, had been returned from Russia.
On Friday, Russian propaganda media claimed that Moscow had handed over 1,200 bodies of Ukrainian Armed Forces personnel to Kyiv, while receiving none in return. A representative of the Coordination Headquarters responded, saying that “everything is proceeding according to the agreements,” Kyiv Post journalist reports.
In early June, Kyiv and Moscow reached an agreement to return the bodies of 6,000 fallen soldiers from each side, according to Ukrainian officials.
The deal followed a second round of peace talks in Turkey, where Ukrainian and Russian delegations discussed key humanitarian issues, including POW exchanges, the return of deported Ukrainian children, and the groundwork for a possible ceasefire.
This return was made possible through the joint efforts of the Coordination Headquarters, the Security Service of Ukraine, the Armed Forces, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights, the Secretariat of the Commissioner for Missing Persons, the State Emergency Service, and other Ukrainian security and defense bodies.
The Coordination Headquarters expressed gratitude to the International Committee of the Red Cross for its assistance and thanked the Ukrainian military for organizing the transportation and transfer of the deceased to forensic authorities and specialized state institutions.
Ukraine regularly carries out exchanges of fallen soldiers with Russia. The most recent transfer was on June 11, when the bodies of 1,212 fallen Ukrainian defenders were returned, including soldiers who had fought in Russia’s Kursk Oblast.
The previous transfer, in mid-May, involved the return of 909 bodies. Many of the fallen were soldiers who died in some of the war’s fiercest battles, including those in Kurakhove, Pokrovsk, Bakhmut, Vuhledar, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Sumy, and Kharkiv. Some of the bodies had been held in morgues on Russian territory.
Before that, another exchange of 909 bodies occurred in mid-April. That repatriation marked at least the eighth time since October that Ukraine had recovered 500 or more fallen soldiers in a single transfer. A similar exchange also took place on March 28.
Unlike Ukraine, Russia does not publicly report the return of its fallen soldiers and has not updated its official casualty figures since late 2022, when it claimed that fewer than 6,000 Russian troops had been killed.
An ongoing investigation by Mediazona and BBC News Russian has confirmed the identities of approximately 100,000 Russian soldiers killed, based on open-source data.