Busy, so just a few items on Ukraine.
- Colonel Markus Reisner of the Austrian Army just published a new overview (vid) on the state of the war in Ukraine.
- During the negotiations in Istanbul Russia offered to 'unilaterally' deliver to Ukraine the 6,000 bodies of service members of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Today the Russian delegation leader in Istanbul, Vladimir Medinsky, reported to President Putin:
We proposed, unilaterally, to transfer to Kiev over 6,000 bodies of Ukrainian troops. They will be transferred using refrigerator cars where they are currently kept. We are ready to begin shortly. We understand Ukraine may have bodies of our troops as well although in much smaller numbers. But we are ready to take them over, if any.
The bodies were mostly recovered by the Russians after the hasty retreat of the Ukrainian army from its incursion into Russia's Kursk oblast.
This offer is a significant problem (in Russian) for the Ukrainian government. Family members of the deceased soldiers are of course pressing to receive and to bury those bodies. But acknowledging that those dead are indeed Ukrainian soldiers would be quite costly.
The dead are currently only listed as 'missed'. If they are declared dead their families will be entitled to receive 15 million hryvnias (UAH) (US$ 1 = UAH 41,50) each (3 million at once and the rest over three years and three months).
The return of six thousand bodies of military personnel killed in battle will cost 90 billion hryvnias (~US$ 2.2 billion) of payments from the Ukrainian budget. This is almost 10% of the military budget of Ukraine for the whole of the year.
The Ukrainian government will have to take the bodies. But it is likely to declare most of them 'unidentified' to then slow walk the process of identifying and naming them.
(The high cost for the budget also explains why the official Ukrainian death count is always kept low.)
- Mediniski made another point which is also of interest:
Finally, the Ukrainian side handed over to us the list of 339 children allegedly kidnapped from the territory of Ukraine. Here is the list. We are working on it, through the office of the Commissioner for Children’s Rights. We will investigate every name.
But I must note that, for propaganda purposes, they earlier claimed that tens and hundreds of thousands of children had been brought over here. In fact, the actual number is 339 and we still need to check how many are in Russia, evacuated by our soldiers from under fire, and how many will eventually turn up in Europe, as experience shows.
The 'experience' Medinsky mentions refers to this item from last year's April:
Ukrainian children deported by Russia have been found in Germany: details have emerged
Ukrainian law enforcement officers, with the assistance of their German colleagues, have established the whereabouts of 161 Ukrainian children abducted by Russia in Germany. They were wanted as forcibly transferred to the temporarily occupied territories or deported to Russia and Belarus.
Those Ukrainian children, abducted by the bad, bad Putin, had fled with their parents to Germany …