Russia ready to hand over remains of 1,212 troops to Ukraine
The first batch of 1,212 bodies of dead Ukrainian servicemen has been delivered to a designated exchange point and is ready to be handed over to Kiev, the Russian Defense Ministry has said.
Moscow had decided to return the bodies of over 6,000 Ukrainian soldiers in a unilateral humanitarian gesture during talks between the two sides in Istanbul on Monday. The Russians tried transferring the remains on Saturday, but Kiev's representatives failed to show up at the exchange point on the border between Belarus and Ukraine.
'The Russian side is fully ready to fulfill all agreements on the return of the bodies of the dead Ukrainian soldiers and the exchange [of prisoners],' Russian Lieutenant General Aleksandr Zorin, who was a member of Moscow's negotiating team in Istanbul, told journalists.
However, he warned that the transfer of the remains could fail yet again, saying that there are 'signals' that it could be postponed until next week. 'Russia is waiting for confirmation from Ukraine,' he said.
'I have no comment regarding the rhetoric that it is some sort of a political decision. It is a purely humanitarian action. Not the first of such kind and, regrettably, not the last one,' he said about the Russian decision to hand the remains over to Ukraine.
Kiev had refused to accept the bodies of its fallen soldiers on Saturday, claiming that it hadn't agreed on the date of the transfer and accusing Moscow of 'humanitarian issues for informational purposes.'
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova reacted to the move by saying that Ukraine 'does not need its people; neither dead nor alive.'
'There is no nation or ethnic group in the world that would refuse to bury its soldiers. But there is the Kiev regime, which professes a misanthropic ideology and is committing genocide against its own people,' Zakharova insisted.
A member of the Russian parliament's International Affairs Committee, Dmitry Belik, told RT that one of the reasons for Vladimir Zelensky's government failing to take back the bodies of its soldiers could be Ukraine's unwillingness to pay compensation to their families.
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