Ukraine receives bodies of 757 troops killed in war with Russia

Kyiv said Friday it had received the bodies of hundreds of Ukrainian troops killed in battle with Russian forces, in one of the largest repatriations since Russia invaded.

The exchange of prisoners and return of their remains is one of the few areas of cooperation between Moscow and Kyiv since the Kremlin mobilised its army in Ukraine in February 2022.

The repatriation announced by the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, a Ukrainian state agency, is the largest in months and underscores the high cost and intensity of fighting ahead of the war’s three-year anniversary.

“The bodies of 757 fallen defenders were returned to Ukraine,” the Coordination Headquarters said in a post on social media.

It specified that 451 of the bodies were returned from the “Donetsk direction”, probably a reference to the battle for the mining and transport hub of Pokrovsk.

The city that once had around 60,000 residents has been devastated by months of Russian bombardments and is the Kremlin’s top military priority at the moment.

The statement also said 34 dead were returned from morgues inside Russia, where Kyiv last August mounted a shock offensive into Russia’s western Kursk region.

Friday’s repatriation is at least the fifth involving 500 or more Ukrainian bodies since October.

Military death tolls are state secrets both in Russia and Ukraine but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed last December that 43,000 Ukrainian troops had been killed and 370,000 had been wounded since 2022.

The total number is likely to be significantly higher.

Russia does not announce the return of its bodies or give up-to-date information on the numbers of its troops killed fighting in Ukraine.

Meanwhile, more than a third of Ukrainians believe the war will end by the close of 2025, according to a poll of around 1,100 people by research company Gradus Research in December, up from about a quarter six months earlier.

That poll found that 31% of respondents expected the war to go on “for years” and another 31% said it was difficult to say.

Oleksandr Merezhko, head of the Ukrainian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, also said Trump could cement his legacy by bringing peace and security to Ukraine.

“Ukraine needs to become a success story for Trump,” Merezhko told Reuters. “He can enter history as a winner.”

The negotiating positions of the two warring sides remain far apart, though. Advisers to Trump now concede that the Ukraine war will take months or even longer to resolve, a sharp reality check on his biggest foreign policy promise to strike a peace deal on his first day in office.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has pushed hard for an invitation to NATO as the best way of deterring future Russian aggression; he and other officials fear any agreement falling short of an iron-clad alliance from Washington would allow the Kremlin to bide its time and eventually strike back.

“They will build up their military capabilities to come back,” Oleksii Reznikov, a former defence minister and peace negotiator with Russia, told Reuters. “They will want to continue what they started in 2014 and continued in 2022.”

While Putin has said he is open to discussing a ceasefire deal with Trump, he rules out making any major territorial concessions and insists Kyiv abandon ambitions to join NATO, five sources told Reuters in November.