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Ukraine Works to Identify 6,000 Bodies Sent From Russia in Makeshift Rail Platform Lab

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The bodies arrive by the hundreds on a dusty railroad platform, nameless, mutilated, unearthed from mud, sand or collapsed trenches. In quick procession, they are unloaded in their white bags from a refrigerated car and wheeled to a trackside field lab, where they are examined and documented with quiet efficiency.

This vast shipment of the dead, returned by Russia in a swap with Ukraine, is one of the few results of three rounds of American-orchestrated cease-fire talks. Those negotiations and a summit on Friday between President Trump and the Russian leader, Vladimir V. Putin, have done little to slow the fighting on the battlefield.

Ukraine hopes to identify each of the 6,000 bodies it has received from Russia under a deal reached in Istanbul — which also included a prisoner exchange — and return the soldiers’ remains to loved ones.

The bodies are just a fraction of the more than 70,000 people in Ukraine, both military personnel and civilians, who have been listed as “missing under special circumstances,” the legal designation for those who have disappeared during more than three years of war.

A group of people in white outfits and blue gloves stand under netting and examine remains.

The first remains arrived in Ukraine in June. A conveyor-belt-like process at a railway station in the Odesa region in southern Ukraine is intended to speed up identification, bypassing traditional autopsies in morgues, which are already overloaded.