Ukraine announced on Friday that it has recovered the remains of 250 soldiers and delivered the remains of 38 soldiers to Moscow, in one of the largest exchanges of this kind since the start of the Russian invasion. These bodies belong to soldiers who were killed in Bakhmut and Avdiivka, two fortified cities in eastern Ukraine that were seized by the Russian army after months of fierce fighting, as well as in the Luhansk (east), Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia (south) regions, according to a statement from the Ukrainian coordination committee responsible for the file.
The committee clarified that some remains were recovered from the city of Mariupol, which was devastated by the Russian siege in the early months of the war in 2022, and from morgues in Russia.
Petro Yatsenko, spokesperson for the committee, noted, "It is one of the largest" operations of this type. Another Ukrainian government agency announced that the remains of 38 Russian soldiers were delivered as part of this exchange, facilitated by the Red Cross.
The identities of the fallen soldiers will be determined through DNA analysis before they are handed over to their families for burial, according to the coordination committee. The committee released photos showing white mobile morgues on a rural road and individuals wearing protective suits, some of which had the Red Cross emblem.
Yatsenko mentioned that the process of identifying the bodies "takes weeks," and sometimes months. The location of the remains exchange was not specified, but such operations typically occur at the Russian-Ukrainian border in the Sumy region in northeastern Ukraine.
