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KYIV: Russia on Thursday returned 1,000 bodies to Ukraine, which Moscow said were the remains of Kyiv’s soldiers killed in battle, a Ukrainian government agency said.
The exchange of prisoners of war and killed soldiers is one of the few remaining areas of cooperation between Kyiv and Moscow, which invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
“Repatriation measures took place today,” Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War announced on social media.
“One thousand bodies, which according to the Russian side belong to Ukrainian servicemen, were returned to Ukraine,” the agency added.
Ukraine has said that Moscow handed over to Kyiv the bodies of killed Russian soldiers during previous repatriations.
Kyiv also announced in September, August and July that it had received the remains of 1,000 killed soldiers from Russia, illustrating the intensity of fighting across the sprawling front line.
The Coordination Headquarters said law enforcement would soon begin the process of identifying the repatriated remains and thanked the International Committee of the Red Cross for its role in the repatriation.
Tens of thousands of soldiers have been killed on both sides since Russia invaded, though neither side regularly publishes data on their own casualties.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in February this year told US media that Ukraine has lost more than 46,000 soldiers and that tens of thousands are considered missing in action.
The BBC and independent outlet Mediazona say they have documented more than 135,000 Russian soldiers killed in the three-and-a-half-year campaign, using open-source data, with the actual number likely higher.

DHAKA: The verdict in the crimes against humanity case against ousted Bangladesh prime minister Sheikh Hasina will be delivered on November 13, the attorney general said, as the trial ended on Thursday.
Hasina, 78, has defied court orders to return from India to face charges of ordering a deadly crackdown in a failed attempt to crush a student-led uprising.
“If she believed in the justice system, she should have returned,” Attorney General Md Asaduzzaman said in his closing speech of the nearly five-month-long trial in Dhaka.
“She was the prime minister but fled, leaving behind the entire nation — her fleeing corroborates the allegations.”
Her trial in absentia, which opened on June 1, heard months of testimony alleging Hasina ordered mass killings.
Up to 1,400 people were killed between July and August 2024, according to the United Nations.
Prosecutors have filed five charges, including failure to prevent murder, amounting to crimes against humanity under Bangladeshi law.
They have demanded the death penalty if she is found guilty.
Chief prosecutor Tajul Islam has accused Hasina of being “the nucleus around whom all the crimes were committed” during the uprising.
Her co-accused are former interior minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal, also a fugitive, and ex-police chief Chowdhury Abdullah Al-Mamun, who is in custody and has pleaded guilty.

- ‘We want justice’ -

Witnesses included a man whose face was ripped apart by gunfire.
The prosecution also played audio tapes — verified by police — that suggested Hasina directly ordered security forces to “use lethal weapons” against protesters.
Hasina, assigned a state-appointed lawyer, has refused to recognize the court’s authority.
Defense lawyer Md Amir Hossain said she was “forced to flee” Bangladesh, claiming that she “preferred death and a burial within her residence compound.”
Her now-banned Awami League says she “categorically denies” all charges and has denounced the proceedings as “little more than a show trial.”
Asaduzzaman, the attorney general, said it had been a fair trial that sought justice for all victims.
“We want justice for both sides of the crimes against humanity case, that claimed 1,400 lives,” he said, listing several of those killed, including children.
The verdict will come three months ahead of elections expected in early February 2026, the first since Hasina’s overthrow.