KYIV: Kyiv said Friday it had received the bodies of hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers killed during battles with Russia, the second such patriation in the space of three weeks.
The exchange of prisoners and war dead is one of the few areas of cooperation between the two sides since Russia invaded Ukraine more than three years ago.
“As a result of repatriation activities, the bodies of 909 fallen Ukrainian defenders were returned to Ukraine,” the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, a government agency, said in a statement on social media.
On 28 March, the two countries conducted a similar exchange, with Kyiv receiving the same number of bodies, 909, and Moscow 43, according to Russian state media.
Russia has not commented on the latest patriation.
In mid-February, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky told US broadcaster NBC News that more than 46,000 of his soldiers had been killed and some 380,000 wounded.
Russia has not reported on its losses since autumn 2022, when it acknowledged fewer than 6,000 soldiers killed.
An ongoing investigation by Mediazona and BBC News Russian has identified the names of around 100,000 dead Russian soldiers since the beginning of the war, based on information from publicly available sources.