Russia and Ukraine announced Friday that they exchanged the bodies of 122 fallen soldiers, the fourth publicly known swap between the two warring sides since the start of this year.
Moscow received the remains of 23 soldiers, the RBC news website reportedciting Russian lawmaker Shamsayil Saraliyev.
Kyiv, meanwhile, repatriated 99 bodies, according to Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War.
The coordination identified center 77 of the soldiers as those who had been killed in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region, 20 in the southern Zaporizhzhia region and two in the eastern Kharkiv region.
“After identification, the bodies of our defenders will be handed over to their families for a decent burial,” the Ukrainian side said.
According to reporting by The Telegraph, Russia and Ukraine swap their war dead along a so-called “bodies corridor,” where mines are temporarily removed along the two countries’ shared border to accommodate vans carrying the fallen soldiers.
Ukraine has so far returned more than 2,500 bodies of its soldiers as it hopes to locate and identify more than 24,000 registered missing Ukrainian soldiers.