A few hundred bodies repatriated, for a conflict that potentially left hundreds of thousands dead. Ukrainian authorities announced Friday that Russia had handed over the bodies of 563 soldiers killed in the war between the two countries, without saying whether it was an exchange.
Some “320 bodies of defenders killed in the Donetsk sector and 89 soldiers who fell in the Bakhmout sector were repatriated. We also managed to repatriate 154 bodies from morgues in Russia,” said the Ukrainian coordinating organization for prisoners of war.
According to this source, this repatriation was possible, among other things, thanks to a collaboration involving Ukrainian relief, the army, the Ministry of the Interior, the parliamentary commissioner for human rights and the commission for missing persons.
This is one of the largest repatriations of bodies of Ukrainian soldiers killed since the start of the Russian invasion in 2022.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine reveals the extent of their military losses, but media and analysts estimate them at several tens, even hundreds of thousands of deaths in more than two and a half years of fighting.
In September, the American daily Wall Street Journal estimated that the war in Ukraine had left a total of one million dead and wounded on both sides.
