Russia awaits Ukraine's confirmation on planned exchange of dead fighters, officials say

Russian officials said Sunday that Moscow is still awaiting official confirmation from Ukraine that a planned exchange of 6,000 bodies of soldiers killed in action will take place, reiterating allegations that Kyiv had postponed the swap.

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On the front line in the war, Russia said that it had pushed into Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region.

Russian state media quoted Lt. Gen. Alexander Zorin, a representative of the Russian negotiating group, as saying that Russia delivered the first batch of 1,212 bodies of Ukrainian soldiers to the exchange site at the border and is waiting for confirmation from Ukraine, but that there were "signals’ that the process of transferring the bodies would be postponed until next week.

Citing Zorin on her Telegram channel, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova asked whether it was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's "personal deci-

sion not to take the bodies of the Ukrainians" or whether "someone from NATO prohibited it.”

Ukrainian authorities said plans agreed upon during direct talks in Istanbul on Monday were proceeding accordingly, despite what Ukraine's intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, called Russian attempts to "unilaterally dictate the parameters of the exchange process."