A planned exchange of Russian and Ukrainian prisoners of war failed to take place on Saturday, with Moscow accusing Kyiv of postponing the swap at the last minute, something Ukrainian officials dismissed as \u201cdirty games\u201d from the Kremlin. <\/p>\n
Russia said Ukraine unexpectedly postponed a transfer involving prisoners of war and the bodies of dead soldiers, leaving more than 1,200 frozen Ukrainian bodies waiting in refrigerated trucks at an exchange point with no one to collect them. <\/p>\n
Ukraine rejected Russia\u2019s account of the events, saying that the two sides had agreed to exchange seriously wounded and young troops on Saturday but a date had not yet been set for the repatriation of soldiers\u2019 bodies. <\/p>\n
During a second round of direct peace talks in Istanbul on Monday, Russia and Ukraine agreed to exchange more prisoners this weekend. Vladimir Medinsky, the head of Russia\u2019s delegation for peace talks with Ukraine, said this week that the exchange would be the largest since of the three-year war. <\/p>\n
\u201cIn strict accordance with the Istanbul agreements, the Russian side began a humanitarian operation to transfer more than 6,000 bodies of killed Ukrainian servicemen,\u201d as well as badly wounded soldiers under the age of 25, Medinsky said Saturday afternoon on Telegram. <\/p>\n
He claimed that 1,212 bodies of killed Ukrainian soldiers were at the exchange point, with the rest \u201con their way.\u201d He also said that Russia gave Ukraine the first list of 640 prisoners of war for exchange, listed as \u201cwounded, seriously ill and young people,\u201d in order to start the swap. <\/p>\n
In a video posted by Russia\u2019s Defense Ministry on Telegram, two men wearing hazmat suits are seen opening the doors to the back of a truck parked on the side of a road. Inside the truck were dozens of sealed white bags, which the ministry said contained the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers. <\/p>\n
Medinsky said Russia\u2019s Defense Ministry contact group was waiting at the border with Ukraine, but alleged that Kyiv had \u201cunexpectedly postponed the transfer of bodies and the exchange of prisoners of war for an indefinite period\u201d and had given \u201cpretty weird reasons\u201d for doing so. <\/p>\n
Ukraine swiftly rejected the accusations, saying Medinsky\u2019s claims \u201cdo not correspond to reality.\u201d It said the exchange of prisoners of war and soldiers\u2019 bodies were separate processes. <\/p>\n
\u201cUnfortunately, instead of constructive dialogue, we are again faced with manipulations and attempts to use sensitive humanitarian issues for informational purposes,\u201d Ukraine\u2019s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War wrote on Telegram. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe call on the Russian side to stop playing dirty games,\u201d it added. <\/p>\n
Ukraine\u2019s Defense Ministry said Russia was creating \u201cartificial obstacles\u201d and making \u201cfalse statements\u201d to obstruct the exchange of living prisoners, reneging on what had been agreed in Istanbul. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe Ukrainian side has faced yet another attempt to renege on the agreements after the fact,\u201d the ministry said. <\/p>\n
Although prisoner of war swaps had been a rare point of agreement between the warring countries, the unraveling of Saturday\u2019s scheduled exchange underscores the lack of trust that has so far marred the peace talks. <\/p>\n
The spat came soon after Russia launched another aerial assault on Ukraine, killing three people in the city of Kharkiv. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A planned exchange of Russian and Ukrainian prisoners of war failed to take place on Saturday, with Moscow accusing Kyiv of postponing the swap at the last minute, something Ukrainian officials dismissed as \u201cdirty games\u201d from the Kremlin. Russia said Ukraine unexpectedly postponed a transfer involving prisoners of war and the bodies of dead soldiers, <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17132,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17131","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17131"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17131\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}