How Russia manipulates exchange of bodies of dead and what Ukraine should do

It is an unpleasant [situation] because it is supported and amplified by Russia. Unfortunately, part of the Ukrainian media space (of course, we are not talking about traditional media now, but mostly about social networks, Telegram channels — anonymous, non-anonymous) picks up this topic and treats it very uncritically.

The issue is not even the number of the dead who were going to be exchanged, but the fact that Russia has fixated on this topic, that "Ukraine refuses to do this." And it should be noted that they have done a very good job with it from the point of view of various manipulative technologies.

Perhaps, to some extent, our bodies responsible for this exchange have not worked well enough. They provided absolutely exhaustive, in my opinion, explanations of what is really happening. But the situation is such that perhaps it would have been better to act a little ahead of time than to comment on all the nonsense and outright manipulations that the Russians were injecting.

Now the situation has normalized a bit, and we see that the exchange process is underway, it is not yet completed. That is, it will be a rather long story that will take a certain period of time.

But the Russians, of course, will continue to play on this very sensitive topic in the future. This problem exists, it has not gone anywhere. In fact, it was not born yesterday, it is not specifically related to the current stage of the exchange. It is a rather long-standing problem that exists. It just didn't always come into the public sphere.

Now, the Russians (this is part of their campaign) are trying to maximize the hype around this problem. They have several goals here at once. On the one hand, attempts to advance on the front, on the other hand, attacks on civilian infrastructure, which we observe almost every day. And they have now activated their entire information network and are trying to inject "doomsday" messages through it, as they say, so that Ukrainians do not react very rationally to the actions, including those of our official bodies that deal with these issues.

For now, the situation is under control. Let's hope it stays that way. But here, it is not so much about giving some explanations in response to the actions of the Russians, but rather about setting the agenda ourselves and explaining what is happening.

Because there was even an attempt by the Russians to massively add their own, Russians, to those so-called lists. And thus kill two birds with one stone: inflate these lists and, secondly, give the bodies of their [dead] in order to simply not pay some money to the families and hide the scale of the losses that exist on the territory of Russia.