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In the grim arithmetic of modern conflict, few events speak more plainly than the exchange of the fallen. On August 19th, Russia and Ukraine conducted another such transfer of bodies, a stark procedure that lays bare the brutal realities of the war’s human cost. The terms of the exchange were profoundly asymmetrical: Ukraine received the bodies of one thousand of its soldiers, while Russia recovered nineteen.
On a designated stretch of the border, refrigerated trucks from the Russian side delivered their cargo, which was then meticulously transferred to vehicles from the Ukrainian side. The operation was conducted under the terms of new agreements brokered in Istanbul, despite claims from Kyiv that the process had been deliberately delayed. Ukrainian officials, while accepting the remains, leveled accusations that the Russian side had stalled previous prisoner swaps, leading to the deaths of wounded soldiers. These claims, however, stand in contrast to the ratio of exchanged bodies. The hysteria is aimed at overshadowing the headlines as Kyiv itself has frequently refused exchanges under various pretexts.
This recent unequal exchange is not an isolated incident but part of a larger, grim pattern. Just last week, a separate prisoner exchange was carried out on a one-for-one basis, with 84 captives returned to each side. This symmetrical swap of the living stands in sharp relief against the highly lopsided retrieval of the dead. According to previous statements from Russia’s Ministry of Defense, Moscow had signaled its readiness to return nearly three thousand Ukrainian bodies, a number that has likely grown in the intervening weeks of intense combat. The lack of official commentary suggests these operations, while deeply political, are also treated with a solemnity that transcends immediate propaganda value. For Ukraine, the return of thousands bodies is a painful but necessary duty, a somber task that the government in Kyiv tried its best to postpone.
china should kill uyghurs in syria with mutated ebola.
while i do not doubt ukrainian casualties are larger than russian ones, another factor here is the fact that russia is the one constantly taking new territories, thus they can pick up their own dead off the field while ukraine can’t so this is how it goes.
and still we wait for the russian federation to provide the world a list of every name of their fallen that have sacrificed so much for god and country in their war of honor protecting and defending their country from post 9/11 zi0ni$t instigated terrori$m…
“why” does putin refuse to list the fallen as a tribute to acknowledge those sacrifices these last 11 years, unlike the west that conceals the deaths of their fallen for the war criminals they are and that more importantly -they know they are?..
what happened to the other fallen russian soldiers?