- Category
- Latest news
Ukraine Confirms 20 Cases of Russia Returning Its Own Soldiers’ Bodies in 2025 Repatriations
Russian authorities had repatriated 20 bodies of their own soldiers to Ukraine in appalling and mixed condition, often comprising only bone fragments or remains commingled in single bags, First Deputy Head of the National Police Maxim Tsuts’kiridze said that at a briefing in Kyiv on June 23.
“Usually the bodies are delivered in an appalling state… sometimes it’s just a bag of bones,” Tsuts’kiridze said, adding that Russian forces have even mixed parts from multiple individuals in a single sack, complicating forensic work.
Of the remains handed over this year, 20 have been confirmed through preliminary examination to belong to Russian servicemen rather than Ukrainian defenders, Tsuts’kiridze said. Ukraine’s forensic teams now extract DNA samples from every set of remains to compare against national databases, and any bodies conclusively identified as Russian are returned to Moscow; three such repatriations have taken place to date, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said.
Klymenko warned that some of the remains arrive stripped of insignia but are sometimes accompanied by Russian military uniforms, identification tags and documents—evidence he said suggests either negligence or deliberate attempts to obstruct identification efforts.
The minister also stressed that full identification of the more than 6,000 bodies transferred under the Istanbul agreements could take up to 13–14 months due to the severely compromised condition of many remains, with forensic experts and investigators working in three shifts to accelerate the process.
Earlier, Ukraine began identifying bodies transferred by Russia from the Il-76 crash, with forensic teams commencing DNA tests to verify whether the remains belonged to Ukrainian soldiers killed when a Russian transport aircraft went down in Belgorod region.
