Russia returned to Ukraine today 1,000 bodies of Ukrainian soldiers killed in battle, the Ukrainian agency in charge of prisoners of war said.

“Today repatriation measures took place. One thousand bodies, presented by the Russian side as Ukrainian soldiers, were returned to Ukraine,” the service said on Telegram. Investigators and specialists from the Interior Ministry will soon begin the work of identifying the bodies, the same source added.

The previous return of bodies, also 1,000, had taken place in late October.

In total more than 15,000 bodies have been handed over from Russia to Ukraine since the beginning of the war. For its part in the same period Kiev has returned a few hundred bodies to Moscow.

The exchanges of bodies of dead soldiers and prisoners of war are the only result of negotiations between Ukraine and Russia more than three and a half years after the war began.

In February, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told a US television network that his country had lost nearly 46,000 soldiers by 2022, a number analysts believe is lower than the actual number, while “tens of thousands” of others are believed to be missing or held as prisoners of war by Russia.