Ukraine on Saturday dared Russia to produce the bodies of Ukrainian prisoners of war killed in a plane crash as it questioned Moscow’s accusations that Kyiv’s forces shot down the aircraft.

“There are no corpses. There is nothing,” Kyrylo Budanov, chief of Ukraine’s GUR military intelligence agency, said in an interview with state TV.

Budanov added that Moscow “did not show fields (in the crash site) covered with corpses and remains.”

“If it happened as Russia claims, why does Russia... continue to hide the bodies?” Budanov asked.

Russia said 65 Ukrainian POWs aboard an Ilyushin-76 military transport plane were killed on Wednesday when it crashed near the border of the two countries.

Russia’s Investigative Committee has published three videos of what it says is the crash site.

One showed a blurred close-up of a dead body. In another, a forensics team is sealing up a single body bag.

A third was grainy footage purporting to show vehicles transporting the prisoners to the plane before it took off, but the quality was too poor to verify this.

Kyiv has confirmed a prisoner exchange was due to take place on the same day and has not explicitly denied shooting down the plane.

But it said Moscow did not request a temporary aerial ceasefire near the border, as it had previously when POWs were being flown to a scheduled exchange.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that Budanov’s GUR was aware the prisoners were going to be transferred by plane.

He said it was “obvious” Ukrainian forces shot it down and had gone ahead with the attack knowing it could have been carrying their own troops.

Kyiv has not yet outlined its version of events, although Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has called for an international investigation, and both sides have opened criminal probes.

Cross-border attack

Meanwhile, Russian troops killed two civilians Saturday in a raid on the Ukrainian village of Andriivka, four kilometers from the border with Russia’s western Kursk region, local officials said.

“This morning, an enemy reconnaissance and sabotage group brutally and cynically shot a brother and sister,” the Sumy regional administration said in a statement.

The attack happened inside a five-kilometer buffer zone along the border with Russia — an area where Kyiv had asked residents to evacuate.

Ukraine’s Prosecutor General said the victims were a 54-year-old man and a 68-year-old woman, killed while driving in an SUV.