On June 19, officials revealed that Russia had returned a body of one of its soldiers to Ukraine during the recent prisoner and body exchange agreement in Istanbul. The body was identified as Alexander Viktorovich Bugaev, born in 1974, who went missing during heavy fighting near Novomykhailivka in Donetsk Oblast in March 2025.
According to Igor Klymenko, a Ukrainian official, Bugaev’s family had been searching for him for months. Russia had located his body but chose to “dump” it among the Ukrainian dead. Klymenko stated that this was proof of how little human life means to Russia and accused them of contempt.
The June 2 negotiations in Istanbul resulted in the most expansive prisoner and body exchange agreement of the full-scale war, although no ceasefire was reached. Ukraine received 6,057 bodies of its fallen soldiers as part of the phased exchange, while Russia took back 78.
