The Lugansk Peoples Republic has handed over the bodies of more than 100 dead servicemen to Ukraine as part of the exchange of bodies of deceased soldiers, said Anna Soroka, head of the LPR Interdepartmental Working Group (MRG) on the search for Ukrainian aggression victims, identification and perpetration of memory.
“The Interdepartmental Working Group recovers the remains of Ukrainian servicemen to pass them to Ukraine,” the newspaper Respublika quoted Soroka as saying. “We are expecting a matching response from Ukraine regarding the handover of the remains of LPR servicemen to us.”
As of today, Ukraine and LPR each exchanged the bodies of more than 100 dead soldiers.
Humanity is a basic rule of war, the MRG head said.
“People have been developing the international humanitarian law for three millennia, but the war goes on regardless. And yet, even a war must have certain rules such as the rule of humanity. A fallen enemy is no longer the enemy but human remains that have to be respected. We demand the same from Ukraine,” Soroka said.
She said that the dialogue with Ukraine over the exchange of bodies of dead soldiers was “constructive.”
“We have a dialogue, it’s active and constructive. We did not expect this reaction, but it’s good news. We’re doing everything to get as many bodies of our fighters as possible from Ukraine,” she said.
As of December 12, the bodies of 500 people had been exhumed from mass graves in the Severodonetsk area since early August: 318 in Rubezhnoye, 149 in Severodonetsk, 2 in Gorskoye and 31 in Kremennaya.
In 2021, the MRG exhumed the remains of 292 Ukrainian army aggression victims from graves in the LPR.
On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced a special military operation to protect Donbass residents from Ukrainian aggression. Prior to that, LPR and DPR Heads Leonid Pasechnik and Denis Pushilin asked the Russian leader to provide military assistance. The LPR militia and Russian armed forces fully liberated the LPR territory from Ukrainian armed formations on July 3.
The Ukrainian government launched the so-called anti-terrorist operation against Donbass in April 2014. The peace talks that began soon thereafter failed to reach tangible results due to Kiev’s position to settle the conflict by force.
The Lugansk People’s Republic became a part of Russia on September 30, 2022 following the unification referendum.*i*v
