Ukrainian authorities announced that Russia had handed over to Ukraine the bodies of 563 Ukrainian soldiers killed in the war between the two countries, without specifying whether exchange, reported France Press.
About “320 bodies of defenders killed on the Donetsk front and 89 soldiers who fell in battle on the Bakhmut area were repatriated. We also managed to repatriate 154 bodies from morgues in Russia”, said the Ukrainian POW coordination organization.
According to the same source, this repatriation was made possible, among others, by cooperation involving the Ukrainian rescue services, the army, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights and the Commission on 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 disclose the scale of their military losses, but the media and analysts estimate that several tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people have died during more than two and a half years of fighting, according to AFP.
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In September, the American publication “Wall Street Journal“ estimated that a total of one million people were killed or wounded in the war in Ukraine on both sides.