Ukraine announced today that it has recovered the bodies of 250 of its soldiers and handed over to Moscow the bodies of 38 Russian soldiers, in one of the largest exchanges of its kind since the war began.

These are soldiers who were killed in its sectors Bahamut and Abdiivkatwo cities in eastern Ukraine captured by the Russian army after months of heavy fighting, as well as in the regions of Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhia, the Ukrainian Coordination Committee clarified in its statement.

Some of the bodies come from Mariupolithe city leveled during the Russian siege in the first months of the war.

“This is one of the largest” operations of its kind, said Commission spokesman Petro Yatchenko.

Another Ukrainian agency said the bodies of 38 Russian soldiers had been handed over as part of an exchange brokered by the Red Cross.

The remains will be handed over to the families of the soldiers for the funerals, after the identities of the dead have been confirmed by DNA analyses. However, the identification process takes many weeks, maybe even months.

The Commission released photographs showing white mobile hearses on a dirt road and people wearing uniforms with the Red Cross emblem.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Europe’s worst conflict since the end of World War II, has killed tens of thousands of people on both sides, according to estimates. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in February that at least 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in the two years of war. Russia, however, does not announce its losses.