Facts about Russia-Ukraine conflict: Odessa port strike shouldn't affect grain export deal, says Kremlin

BEIJING, July 26 (Xinhua) -- The following are the latest developments in the Ukraine crisis:

A recent strike carried out by Russian armed forces on Ukrainian military infrastructure in the port of Odessa should not affect the start of grain exports, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Monday.

The Russian Defense Ministry announced Sunday that the country's armed forces launched a missile attack on the territory of a shipyard in Odessa, destroying a Ukrainian military ship and a depot with U.S. Harpoon anti-ship missiles.

"This (strike) is only linked to military infrastructure. This is in no way connected with the infrastructure that will be used to fulfill the agreements and export grain," Peskov said commenting on the attack.

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In accordance with the Russia-Ukraine grain export deal, a joint coordination center in Istanbul has begun its work, the Russian Defense Ministry said on Tuesday.

A group of Russian experts would arrive in Istanbul on Tuesday and start work in a quadripartite format in a bid to promptly resolve all the necessary issues for the practical implementation of the deal, it said.

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The bodies of twenty-five Ukrainian servicemen killed in the Russia-Ukraine conflict have been returned to Ukraine, Ukraine's Ministry of Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories said Tuesday.

The operation to hand over the bodies to the Ukrainian side was carried out by joint efforts of Ukraine's Commissioner for Missing Persons Oleg Kotenko and the country's law enforcement agencies, the ministry's press service said in a statement.

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The Russian Defense Ministry said Tuesday that their armed forces have used high-precision air-based missiles to hit a temporary deployment point of foreign legion units near Donetsk's Kostantinovka and killed over 40 foreign mercenaries, most of them Poles.

Russia also used high-precision weapons to strike one artillery battalion of Ukraine, destroying more than 70 percent of its personnel and weapons, it added.