Kyiv, Moscow exchanging 1,000 bodies a month, Red Cross says

Ukrainian artilleryman firing from 155mm self-propelled М-109 howitzer on the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region on March 18, 2026. [AFP]

As Russia's war rages on in Ukraine, the Red Cross said Thursday it was facilitating the exchange of around 1,000 bodies each month between the sides, while "thousands and thousands" of dead remain unidentified.

Just back from a visit to Ukraine, International Committee of the Red Cross Director-General Pierre Krahenbuhl said he was struck by "the scale and the scope of the consequences when these military means are deployed between states".

Speaking to reporters in Geneva, he pointed out that "every month, the ICRC participates in the repatriation both ways of 1,000 bodies on average, between the Russian and the Ukrainian side".

"We are there facilitating this in our role of neutral intermediary," he said.

The exchange of prisoners and bodies is the only concrete result of several rounds of direct talks between Kyiv and Moscow, organised since last year under pressure from Washington.

Krahenbuhl said he had visited some of the forensic institutions that ICRC supports in Ukraine, which are dealing with a "gruelling task".

"There are thousands and thousands of bodies that remain unidentified that are stored in these forensic institutions, where the staff every single day attempt ... to identify the bodies, and then to provide answers to deeply anguished families," he said.

Those, he said, are numbers "that we haven't seen in this scale in recent years in conflicts".

He emphasised that many of these bodies are those of soldiers.

That, he said was "different from many other conflicts" where civilians pay a higher price.

"This is a very striking element," he said.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 sparked the bloodiest war in Europe since World War II, forcing the displacement of millions and killing hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians on both sides.