Kyiv said Friday that it had received the bodies of hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers killed during battles with Russia, the second such repatriation in three weeks.
The exchange of prisoners of war and war dead has been one of the few areas of cooperation between the two sides since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
“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 Ukrainian government agency, said on social media.
Russia does not typically announce the return of its bodies or give up-to-date information on the numbers of its troops killed fighting in Ukraine.
But Russian media and military bloggers said 41 bodies of killed Russian soldiers had been returned, citing Shamsail Saraliev, an MP who sits on the parliamentary committee overseeing the offensive.
The exchange came as US-led efforts to bring about a ceasefire between the two sides appears to have stalled.
Tens of thousands on both sides are widely estimated to have been killed, though neither country provides routine updates.
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 around 380,000 wounded.
Russia has not reported on its losses since autumn 2022, when it said fewer than 6,000 soldiers killed.
An ongoing investigation by Mediazona and the BBC’s Russian service has identified the names of around 100,000 dead Russian soldiers since the beginning of the war, based on information from publicly available sources.
