MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia has been ready to start handing over the corpses of Ukraine’s war dead for several days with refrigerated trucks containing the first bodies parked near the border, but Kyiv is still discussing the details, the Kremlin said on Tuesday.
The two sides agreed to repatriate the bodies of soldiers killed in the conflict during talks in Istanbul on June 2, which also resulted in an agreement to exchange prisoners of war, a process which got under way on Monday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has accused Moscow of “trying to play some kind of dirty political and information game” around the issue of the exchanges.
Russia has said it is ready to hand over the bodies of over 6,000 Ukrainian soldiers and receive any bodies of Russian soldiers which Kyiv is able to return.
But Kremlin aide Vladimir Medinsky said on Saturday that the Russian side had shown up at the agreed exchange point with the bodies of 1,212 Ukrainian dead soldiers only to find nobody from Ukraine to take them.
Ukrainian officials responsible for the exchanges did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
Asked about the issue on Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia remained ready to return the bodies and was in talks with Kyiv on the subject, but did not yet know exactly how many bodies of Russian soldiers Ukraine was ready to hand over.
“There is no final understanding. Contact is being made, numbers are being compared. As soon as there is a final understanding, then we hope this exchange will take place,” said Peskov.
“There is one indisputable fact here, which is that we have already been ready on the border for several days with those trailers that were mentioned to make the transfer to the Ukrainian side. This is a fact that everyone sees and knows.”
Russian state media has broadcast images of long white refrigerated trucks containing the bodies which are sealed in individual white bags and are parked up near the border.
(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov; Writing by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge)
