On Sunday, Russian officials stated they are still waiting for official confirmation from Kyiv regarding the planned exchange of 6,000 soldiers’ bodies killed in action. They reiterated allegations that Ukraine had delayed the swap.
According to Russian state media, Lt. Gen. Alexander Zorin, a representative of the Russian negotiating group, mentioned that Russia had transported the initial 1,212 bodies of Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers to the exchange location at the border. They are currently awaiting confirmation from the Ukrainian side, although indications suggest that the body transfer process might be postponed until the following week.
Both Russia and Ukraine traded accusations on Saturday about jeopardizing the planned exchange of 6,000 soldiers’ bodies killed in action. This exchange agreement was reached during direct talks in Istanbul on Monday, which did not make any significant progress towards resolving the ongoing war.
Vladimir Medinsky, a Putin aide who led the Russian delegation, said that Kyiv called a last-minute halt to an imminent swap. In a Telegram post on Saturday, Medinsky said that refrigerated trucks carrying more than 1,200 bodies of Ukrainian troops from Russia had already reached the agreed exchange site at the border when the news came.
In response, Ukraine said Russia was playing “dirty games” and manipulating facts.
According to the main Ukrainian authority dealing with such swaps, no date had been set for repatriating the bodies. In a statement on Saturday, the agency also accused Russia of submitting lists of prisoners of war for repatriation that didn’t correspond to agreements reached on Monday.
It wasn’t immediately possible to reconcile the conflicting claims.
In other developments, one person was killed and another seriously wounded in Russian aerial strikes on the eastern Ukrainian Kharkiv region. These strikes came after Russian attacks targeting the regional capital, also called Kharkiv, killed at least four people and wounded more than two dozen others on Saturday.
Russia fired a total of 49 exploding drones and decoys and three missiles overnight, Ukraine’s air force said Sunday. Forty drones were shot down or electronically jammed.
Meanwhile, Russia’s defense ministry said that its forces shot down 61 Ukrainian drones overnight, including near the capital.
Two people were wounded when a Ukrainian drone attack sparked a fire at a chemical plant in the Tula region.
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