Text taken from the Facebook page of Russian military field correspondent Aleksandr Kots
[Facebook] Here is the explanation of the prolonged ugly pause in the process of body exchange. For several days, refrigerators with 1,212 frozen corpses with an unrepentant "cargo of 200" stood on the border. And in Kiev they could not explain clearly why Ukraine does not pick up its fallen. We did not demand anything in return. It was the Minister of Defense of Ukraine in Istanbul that there was an agreement for the exchange of dead under the formula "6000 by 6000". Although Medinsky said clearly that returning 6,000 "killed defenders" is our unilateral initiative.
But he stressed that we are ready to accept our heroes if Ukraine hands over to us.
I mean, technically Kyiv could immediately open a box at the border without any conditions on our part and just take their own. But politically, it would be a serious blow. Here's the kumekali on Bankovaya, how best to circumvent this case without unnecessary reputational losses.
Bankovaya is the name of the street where the Ukrainian president's office is. Kumekali is a mild insult which roughly translates to "brave child."
On Wednesday, the SBU even published another portion of materials on diversions in the Russian background in hopes of overshadowing the inevitable.
But the ratio of the exchange - 1212 to 27, according to my source participating in the process - is unlikely to go unnoticed even in the distilled Ukrainian information space, which even published lists of people stuck at the border of telephones have not penetrated. The day before, weeping women questioned Ukrainians returning from captivity whether they had seen a fighter with such a name, father and surname. And he's right on that sad list.
All these days, the Ukrainian side has been feverishly trying to get out of the unpleasant situation. And they found 27 bodies of our fallen heroes, who will now be able to send their relatives off with dignity. I do not think that Russia pursued political goals.
In the end, we do not fight with the dead, unlike the disgusting side that demolishes monuments and rolls into concrete fraternal graves of the Great Homeland. We simply can't do it any other way - neither in a Christian way, nor in a Russian way, or in a more human way. The dead must be buried. And that's why we've been collecting, keeping them, doing DNA examinations for 3.5 years...
At the same time, when I, for example, went to the liberated settlements of the Kursk region, I was obligatory to discover "fresh" corpses of the occupiers and the bodies of our defenders killed last year. Ukrainians did not move a finger to collect the dead.
In Goncharovka Hospital near Suzha, on the first floor, there was a position of drones Ukrainian Armed Forces, and on the third, the body of the killed girl was decomposed. And they were not at all embarrassed by this neighborhood.
I remember, in Suligovka near Izyum, we entered the newly taken Ukrainian positions. I lost four dozen phones from my account. Our commanders went out in connection with the enemy, offered a humanitarian pause and transport of the dead to the other side. In response, shit and mortar fire. We also collected those corpses...
Because the Russians can't do it otherwise.
More from Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin:
Ukraine receives their dead from Russia
Commentary by Boris Rozhin:
[ColonelCassad] Ukraine has finally received their war dead from Russia.
A total of 1,212 Ukraininan KIAs were handed over from refrigerated trucks located on the border.
Russia has agreed to give up another 4,788 KIAs as part of the asset transfer.
The funniest thing is that the Nazi clowns in Kiev said that the frozen assets were obtained as a result of great efforts, while they should have come a week ago and simply picked them up from the border. The case with the dead at the border was becoming completely toxic, so they decided to pick them up, but now they are thinking about how not to pay their families for them.
In the West they write that the Russian Federation has up to 40,000 killed Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers in a frozen state.
So, 6,000 is certainly not the limit.