Over the last 48 hours, Kiev has proceeded with the exchange of Ukrainian and Russian POWs, first yesterday with those under 25 years of age and then today, with those with severe injuries and/or serious health issues. Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War (CHTPW) stated today: “The large prisoner exchange continues. For operational security reasons, the exact number of those released will be announced after the exchange process is completed.”
However, Kiev continues to stall on receiving 6,000 Ukrainian soldiers’ bodies identified by Russia, even rejecting an initial delivery of 1,212 bodies on June 6.
Russia had offered the 6,000 corpses for Ukrainian families to provide decent burials, without requiring Kiev to reciprocate. Russia may have many more than 6,000 to hand over. It is not clear how many Russian bodies Ukraine has, nor whether they have provided the same level of identification and preservation of the bodies.
Defense Minister Ruslan Umerov’s formulation on June 2 of the agreement was: “We have also agreed on a 6,000-for-6,000 exchange of bodies of fallen soldiers.”
While the CHTPW cites preparations and logistical issues as causing the holdup, acting Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy proposed a bizarre body-swapping theory to account for so many dead Ukrainian soldiers. Zelenskyy accused Russia of killing other Russians and trying to pass off their bodies as Ukrainian soldiers. “The Russians were killed by the Russians…. Very important, what is important, I’m talking about, that body swapping is important.” The Russians are not taking bodies from the battlefields, Zelenskyy claimed, but are collecting them “here and there.” It seems that Zelenskyy is embarrassed about the number of Ukrainian soldiers that have actually died.
Many commentators have speculated that Kiev is delaying because it is unable to make good on the $362,000 due to the families of deceased soldiers. Indeed, even the first 6,000 bodies would incur a $2 billion obligation for Kiev. However, Ukrainian blogger Anatoly Shariy, living in exile in Spain, rejected this line of thought. He explained in a June 7 video that an avoidance of paying the families cannot be the reason, because Kiev rarely pays the mandated compensation anyway. To receive it, a survivor has at least three hurdles: to prove the soldier died “in the course of duty” (but there may have been no witnesses), present evidence that the deceased was free of illegal substances in his body (yet testing is not provided), and have positive iID (because Russian statements are officially not trusted). Rather, the real reason, Shariy believes, is that Kiev does not have the technical capacity to handle the deceased, store the bodies properly, and do the testing, etc. Zelenskyy has preferred the “Missing in Action” status, and the possibility of a vast assemblage of bodies is hard to square with three years of the pretense that there’s been no bloodbath.
Russian military analyst and editor-in-chief of National Defense magazine Igor Korotchenko told TASS yesterday that Kiev “is deliberately stalling the process. Clearly, Zelenskyy fears that accepting the remains would trigger a political and image disaster. Hence, he hesitates over concerns that a single-stage transfer of such a large number of bodies would confirm the extent of the Ukrainian army’s losses…. From the perspective of the internal political landscape in Kiev, this could have disastrous consequences.”
