Photo: Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War

Moscow has transferred the remains of 1,212 Ukrainian servicemen to Kyiv’s possession, in the first of a series of transfers expected to take place according to an agreement from the two sides’ face-to-face negotiations in Istanbul last week.

The handover took place three days after Russia initially delivered the remains to a designated area on the border with Ukraine, with Moscow and Kyiv blaming each other over the weekend for the transferral’s failure to take place.

Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which announced the transferral of bodies on Wednesday, said that the Ukrainian soldiers had been combatants in Russia’s southwestern Kursk region, as well as Ukraine’s Kharkiv, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions.

It also thanked the International Red Cross for their participation in the process and said that the bodies would now be handed over to representatives of the Interior Ministry and the Ukrainian Health Ministry for a forensic medical examination.

Vladimir Medinsky, the head of Russia’s delegation at the Istanbul negotiations, confirmed that Russia had handed over the soldiers’ remains to Ukraine on Wednesday, having received 27 bodies of Russian soldiers in return, adding that the sides would continue to exchange the remains in the coming days.

Last weekend, Medinsky announced that the remains of 1,212 Ukrainian soldiers had been first delivered to a designated exchange area in refrigerated trucks, but claimed that Ukraine had indefinitely postponed their repatriation for reasons he described as “various and rather strange”.

In response, the Ukrainian Defence Ministry accused Russia of making “false statements”, of backtracking on “clear promises” it had made in Istanbul and of creating “artificial obstacles” that were preventing the bodies’ transferral.

On 2 June, following the latest round of negotiations in Istanbul, Russia and Ukraine agreed to a 6,000-for-6,000 deal governing the repatriation of each side’s combatants. Russia and Ukraine last exchanged the bodies of fallen soldiers on 16 May, when Kyiv received 909 soldiers and Russia received 34.