Russia is purposefully making it more difficult for Ukraine to identify repatriated remains by sending badly mutilated bodies and mixing up body parts, complicating the already grim and painstaking task of matching names to the remains of those killed in Moscow’s war on its neighbor, Ukraine’s top police official has charged.
Russia has also sent Ukraine the remains of some of its own soldiers, Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said in a Telegram post.
Klymenko made the accusation after Kyiv said Russia sent 1,245 bodies to Ukraine on June 16, the last stage of a deal to repatriate the remains of more than 6,000 Ukrainian soldiers. Agreements on repatriations and prisoner exchanges were the only concrete positive outcome of peace talks between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul on May 16 and June 2.
Identifying the bodies of what Moscow says are Ukrainian soldiers is a “complex and lengthy” process involving autopsies, DNA investigations, and other procedures, he said.
“And Russia is also deliberately making the identification process difficult for us. Bodies are returned in an extremely mutilated state, parts of [the same] bodies in different bags,” Klymenko said. “There are cases when the remains of one person are returned even during different stages of repatriation.”
“In addition, during the latest repatriations, the bodies of Russian soldiers were also transferred to us -- mixed with the bodies of Ukrainians,” Klymenko added.
There was no immediate comment from Russian officials on the claims. Russia’s Defense Ministry gave a slightly different figure for the number of bodies returned on June 16: 1,248.
The agreement on the repatriation of remains was reached by the sides on June 2 at one of two meetings in Istanbul, the first direct peace talks since inconclusive negotiations held in the weeks just after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Klymenko said Ukrainian specialists “are working at the limit of what is possible” to identify the remains and that “the biggest challenge is time.”
“We understand the pain and the expectations of families” of the missing and the dead, he said in the post. “We are accelerating the identification process as much as possible. But with each large repatriation, it becomes more difficult to do this, and perhaps this is precisely Russia's goal.”
Moscow said it had received the bodies of 51 Russian soldiers on June 16, taking the total number handed over by Ukraine in the exchanges this month to 78.
There was no official explanation of the lopsided numbers.
Russian forces have been advancing for many months in eastern Ukraine, albeit slowly and at a huge cost in the lives of soldiers, while Ukrainian troops have made few major gains since they took back large amounts of territory in counteroffensives in 2022 and early 2023.
