In a social media group dedicated to finding Russian soldiers missing in action, the dozens of posts made each day typically contain names and pictures, along with pleas from desperate mothers, wives and sisters looking for their loved ones.
But on Wednesday, some group members were voicing their frustration and anger. Moscow announced it had returned the bodies of more than 1,200 Ukrainian soldiers, and in turn received the remains of 27 Russian soldiers.
“How are they getting their fighters, and we can’t ours?” said one woman.
Another group member said that her husband, who is currently listed as missing, told her during one of their last conversations that the fields were “covered with corpses and no one takes them away.”
A third woman replied, “Officials only talk pretty, but in reality it is the opposite.”
As part of a limited deal reached in Istanbul on June 2, Russia and Ukraine agreed to exchange prisoners of war, including the severely wounded and those under the age of 25. They also agreed to repatriate up to 6,000 bodies each, a grim snapshot of the scale of battlefield losses that both sides rarely address.
Neither side has commented on why the numbers of remains repatriated on Wednesday appear so lopsided, with Moscow receiving just 27 bodies.
Repatriating remains
As Russia appears set to ramp up a summer offensive, various groups have tried to estimate the number of soldiers killed and wounded on each side during more than years of war.
The number of Russian soldiers killed and injured is “extraordinary,” wrote the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in a report from earlier this month.
It estimated that this summer, Russia will hit its one millionth casualty — which includes both deaths and injuries — with as many 250,000 soldiers killed. The last time Russian officials publicly spoke about the country’s fatalities was September 2022, when they said just under 6,000 had died in the fighting.
CSIS estimated the number of Ukrainian fatalities to be between 60,000 and 100,000, with more than 300,000 soldiers injured.
In December, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that 43,000 had been killed. He had revealed the information in an effort to correct U.S. President Donald Trump, who had posted online that Ukraine had “lost” hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
Tens of thousands missing
Kyiv says more than 70,000 Ukrainians have been registered missing since 2022. The majority are from the military, but the figure also includes civilians.
Another 12,000 have been removed from the list after being identified among the dead or being freed in exchanges.
On Thursday, Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of the Prisoners of War said that it has received more than 100,000 requests from Russian citizens, looking for relatives who had gone missing while serving in the military.
Thousands of bodies had already been repatriated by both sides before Wednesday’s exchange, in arrangements where numbers are often not publicly announced.
Russia accused Ukraine of trying to delay the most recent repatriations. Over the weekend, state media showed a line of refrigerated trucks it said were carrying the Ukrainian bodies and were posted near the border with Ukraine, ready to be handed over. In response, Ukrainian officials accused Russia of manipulating the facts, saying a date for the exchange had not yet been agreed upon when the trucks arrived.
Prisoner exchanges
Russian officials said the group it returned included soldiers who were killed in the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, where Russia’s military continues to advance, and also from Kursk, which Russia has taken back after the surprise Ukrainian offensive last summer.
On Thursday, as both sides published videos of newly released prisoners of war calling their family members to say they had been freed, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with military members and veterans who have served in what Russia still calls its special military operation.
“Let’s remember those guys who are now on the line of combat contact, on the front,” said Putin, before he led a group assembled in front of him in a cheer, where they shouted “hoorah” three times.
In recent days, Russia has stepped up its attacks on Ukrainian cities, launching a record number of drones, while its military continues to try and press forward in the east and in the north.
The First Deputy of the Defence Committee for Russia’s state Duma said the military is trying to create a 100-kilometre buffer zone in Ukraine’s Sumy region.
More evacuations
According to open source maps created by pro-Ukrainian groups, Russia has taken more than 190 square kilometres of the Sumy region in less than a month.
While in the Donetsk region in the southeast, Russia’s forces are advancing toward the border with the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, according to the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War.
Russia has already laid claim to four Ukrainian regions, and if its military enters the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, it would mean the country is trying to take an even greater swath of Ukrainian territory
“One after another there are settlements and cities, where thousands of people lived, which are being destroyed,” said Pavlo Diachenko, head of communications for the Donetsk region police.
Diachenko is helping evacuate civilians coming under increasing shelling. He told CBC News that earlier this week he helped people leave the city of Lyman, which has come under heavy fighting throughout the war.
In May 2022, the city was captured by Russian forces and then taken back by Ukraine four months later.
The frontline remains barely eight kilometres away.
“The situation is extremely difficult,” said Diachenko, “and we are trying to save as many civilians as possible.”
