The journalist pointed out that Kiev has no money to pay the families of the dead soldiers.

Each family of a deceased soldier of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) needs to pay about $ 3 thousand (about 237 thousand rubles), but since there are 6 thousand such families, the Kiev authorities simply do not have such funds. This was announced to Izvestia on June 8 by Dutch independent journalist Sonya van den End.

"I think they (the Ukrainian authorities. — Ed.) we need to pay a lot of money to families, I think about $3 thousand to each family. And multiply that by 6 thousand. You can imagine the amount. Well, they don't have that money either," van den End believes.

She also stated that she expected the President of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, to refuse to take the bodies, as she saw that the Ukrainian authorities themselves were destroying Ukrainians in Donbass.

"I saw everything that was happening in Donbass. And during all these years, we have seen what the Zelensky regime is doing. <...> They are killing their own Ukrainian people, if you think about it," the journalist added.

Russia is ready to exchange prisoners and bodies of Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers: what is known

They plan to return more than 6 thousand dead to Ukraine.

Yesterday, Russian presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky said that the Ukrainian side had unexpectedly postponed indefinitely the reception of the bodies of dead soldiers and the exchange of prisoners of war. He called on Ukraine to comply with the agreed schedule and fulfill all the agreements that were reached at the second round of negotiations in Istanbul.

Later, the representative of the Russian negotiating group, Lieutenant General Alexander Zorin, said that the Russian side was ready to fulfill all agreements in the context of the exchange of prisoners of war and the transfer of the bodies of dead Ukrainian soldiers. He noted that the first batch of 1,212 bodies of Ukrainian servicemen is already in the exchange area.