Ukraine returned the bodies of 522 dead Ukrainian defenders during the full-scale war.
Oleh Kotenko, the commissioner for issues of missing persons, stated this on the air of the national telethon.
According to him, all these dead people were taken from different directions. Among them are fighters who were on the lists of missing persons.
Kotenko added that before the full-scale war, the bodies of dead soldiers were taken away by agreement with the leaders of the so-called "LPR" and "DPR", currently the intermediary in this matter is the Red Cross. There are no direct contacts with the Russians. The Ukrainian side transmits information about the locations where there were battles with casualties, after which the Russians go to the place to look for bodies and hand them over at a specified place at an agreed time.
- The last transfer of bodies took place on August 9. Then Ukraine returned 17 dead soldiers.
- Before that, the police of the Kyiv oblast reported that more than 270 bodies of the dead from different regions of Ukraine, including the bodies of Azovstal defenders, had arrived at the oblastʼs morgues. The bodies have been examined, but most of them remain unidentified.
- On August 11, the General Staff announced that it had changed the name of the humanitarian project to evacuate the bodies of dead soldiers "Evacuation 200". Now it will bear the name "On the shield", as the volunteers insisted.