Russia says it has handed over 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers' bodies

Russia has handed over the remains of 1,000 soldiers to Ukraine and has received the bodies of 35 Russian soldiers in return, Russia's top negotiator has said.

It comes as Ukraine's chief negotiator was preparing to meet US President Donald Trump's envoys in Geneva for a new round of talks aimed at ending the war which has entered its fifth year.

Two previous rounds of talks hosted by Steve Witkoff and Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner have included Russian negotiators, too, but have not led to a breakthrough.

Hours before the latest talks, Russia launched 420 drones and 39 missiles in six different regions of Ukraine, injuring dozens of people, Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelesnky said.

Vladimir Medinsky, a top aide of Russian President Vladimir Putin, did not give any details about the exchange of bodies in his short announcement on Telegram, but included an image showing bodies being unloaded from a truck. Ukraine has not confirmed the exchange.

The two sides have, however, exchanged thousands of soldiers' bodies over the course of the conflict that began with Putin's decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

The exchange is based on an agreement reached by the two sides during negotiations in Istanbul in June 2025. Moscow and Kyiv agreed to return the bodies of up to 6,000 soldiers each, as well as all sick and heavily wounded prisoners of war and those aged under 25.

Kyiv and Moscow regularly publish estimates of the other side's losses, but do not detail their own.

And from public sources, the BBC has confirmed the names of almost 186,000 people killed fighting on Russia's side in Ukraine. The true death toll is generally accepted to be much higher, as many deaths on the battlefield are not recorded.

So even though estimates suggest more Russians are dying every day, Moscow has returned more bodies to Ukraine overall than it has received.

No-one has explained the discrepancy, even though Russia has previously accused Ukraine of not abiding by the Istanbul agreement, and Ukraine has alleged Russian body returns were irregular and sometimes included Russians' remains - a charge Moscow has rejected.

One possible explanation is that Russia captures more Ukrainian bodies given its troops have been on the attack most of the time and, therefore, more able to retrieve them from the battlefield.

On the eve of the Geneva talks, President Zelensky had a telephone conversation with Trump and said he expected the Geneva meeting would lead to trilateral negotiations at the beginning of March - thus creating "an opportunity to move talks to the leaders' level".

"President Trump supports this sequence of steps," Zelensky said, adding: "This is the only way to resolve all the complex and sensitive issues and finally end the war."

Putin, for his part, has refused to meet Zelensky, describing him as illegitimate - an argument centring on the fact that no presidential election has been held in Ukraine, despite the expiry of Zelensky's term in March 2024.

However, Ukraine's constitution bars holding elections under under martial law - imposed in the wake of Putin's invasion of his neighbour.