Ukraine-Russia war: the frustrating and often fruitless search for missing Russian soldiers

During the six days she spent flipping through pictures of dead soldiers at Russia’s main military morgue for the Ukraine war, Irina Chistyakova tried not to look directly at the disfigured corpses.

If the face was charred beyond recognition, she would focus on whether the teeth resembled those of her son Kirill, a military conscript who had last contacted her from inside Ukraine in late March. In total, she said, she had viewed about 500 photographs.

Chistyakova is among the hundreds of Russians engaged in a grassroots effort to find missing sons, husbands, brothers and other loved ones who fought for Russia, a role that relatives and human rights advocates say was thrust upon them because the Ministry of Defence was woefully unprepared for the task.

The scale is staggering. The Pentagon in late summer estimated that 70,000 to 80,000 Russian soldiers have been killed and wounded, with many others missing.

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But their fate has remained a mystery for many of their loved ones back home, who say the system for finding missing soldiers is as disorganised as Russia’s military effort, which has been marked by dysfunction from the beginning.

“On the phone they tell us that everything is OK, that they are searching, and they put exactly the same thing in their formal, written responses,” Chistyakova (44), said in an interview.

When she travelled to the southeastern city of Rostov-on-Don to scan photos of the dead, she said, she identified two men previously reported as missing from her son’s infantry unit. “How are you searching, if I went to the morgue and found two of your soldiers there?” she said. “That is the question.”

In their quest for answers, relatives said that they hunt for information from all quarters, including repeatedly calling a special Ministry of Defence hotline. They appeal to local governorates, contact military commanders or other soldiers, visit hospitals and morgues and spend countless hours online scanning videos of captured soldiers, as well as seeking advice from online chat groups.

Most come away frustrated, still seeking answers.

“Getting information about Russian soldiers who are fighting, who were taken prisoner or who died has been a problem since the beginning of the conflict,” said Sergei Krivenko, the director of a human rights group that provides legal aide to Russian soldiers. “No one in the Ministry of Defence expected such a scale,” he added, and hence it “simply did not create the appropriate services.”

Russia has only announced casualty figures twice, in late March and in September, when the minister of defence, Sergei Shoigu, said nearly 6,000 soldiers had died. Western estimates are far higher. There are no public Russian government figures of the missing; their troops sometimes leave corpses abandoned on the side of the road as they retreat.

Ukraine is also grappling with the issue of missing soldiers, but the country’s response has been far different. Joint military-civilian search teams have been established in seven conflict areas, Oleh Kotenko, a senior Ukrainian official appointed to organise the effort to track missing persons, told a news conference on September 30th.

More than 4,000 people are listed as missing soldiers, Kotenko said, although he estimated that up to 15 per cent of those were civilians.

In Russia, the absence of any workable official system has prompted parents to organise on their own. Countless chat rooms have sprung up – often focused on soldiers deployed from a particular region or specific units.

Although the chat rooms act as a kind of nationwide support group, they also seethe with frustration, acrimony and mistrust. Suspicions abound that some participants are Ukrainian spies seeking to exploit information about soldiers.

A chat room called A Group of mobilised, Military Wives and Mothers has attracted more than 1,500 participants, but spats among members, especially those who express anti-Russian, anti-war sentiments, creates frequent turnover.

The biggest source of frustration seems to be the Ministry of Defence hotline for relatives of the missing. Several people interviewed said the information changed repeatedly – sometimes they were told that the soldier was busy fighting, sometimes that he was killed and sometimes that he was missing.

“It’s different every time,” said Maria Shumova. Her son Vladimir (23) had called sporadically after the invasion, managing to blurt out that he was alive and well before the line disconnected. The last call came March 15th.

Shumova managed to piece together some of what happened by talking to soldiers from Vladimir’s reconnaissance unit. She knows that he was with a group of armoured personnel carriers in Dmytrivka, east of Kyiv, when one of them was ambushed. The soldiers who went to its rescue were attacked in turn. Vladimir’s vehicle exploded and some of his brothers-in-arms think that he died, but his fate remains unclear.

Asked for an update late last month, she texted back: “There is no news, there are no answers, no one cares about anything.”

Still, she cannot abandon the hunt. Like many, she scrolls constantly through a Ukrainian Telegram channel called Look for Your Own that publishes videos of captured Russian soldiers. She also submitted a query through the Red Cross but has not received an answer.

“For me, it is all the time, you know, waiting, searching, constantly spinning in my head, where to write, how to find my son, I just don’t know any more,” Shumova said.

Accounting for the missing was also a problem in the two wars in Chechnya, said Alexander Cherkasov, a board member for Memorial, the Russian human rights organisation that shared the Nobel Peace Prize last month but has been targeted for liquidation by the Kremlin.

In those conflicts, investigators from Memorial visited the battlefields to try to glean information about the missing. Those days are long gone, Cherkasov said. “In Putin’s Russia, it is impossible for NGOs to take the lead now, it is up to individuals,” he said.

The Ministry of Defence did not respond to a request for comment about its system for finding soldiers.

Tatyana Moskalkova, the ombudswoman for human rights in Russia, said earlier this week that she had spoken with her new Ukrainian counterpart and that they will work on the issue of missing soldiers, but some families who had contacted her previously suggested that she did not seem to have any better information.

Chistyakova, the mother of Kirill, said she has no love lost for the Ukrainians, nor for the Russian military. She sees the war as an existential battle with the West, echoing the narrative promoted by the Kremlin, but does not think either Russia or Ukraine needed it.

She spent five months wrestling with the military bureaucracy, including presenting a letter to the Kremlin seeking answers signed by the relatives of more than 100 missing.

Chistyakova then decided to search herself. She travelled to the morgue in Rostov-on-Don, arriving just before Augiust 26th, her son’s 20th birthday.

The sprawling morgue is housed in series of low warehouses behind a military hospital. Tattered, bloody uniforms lie about the place and a terrible smell hangs in the air, she said.

Relatives can look at pictures of the bodies on several office computers. A military psychologist hovers nearby, offering tranquilisers if it becomes too much. One group of Chechen men searching for relatives lived near the morgue in their cars for several weeks. Chistyakova said she had encouraged another man, reluctant to enter, to search the photographs; he found his son.

Through her own research, she discovered that 32 soldiers from her son’s platoon were killed, four are missing and four remain alive. Chistyakova even braved crossing into the war zone, to Donetsk, where one mother had found her son in the morgue.

In Rostov, Chistyakova managed to identify one soldier because he had an unusual bear-claw tattoo on his right hand. His body had arrived at the morgue June 3rd, more than two months before she found him. Nobody was actively looking because his parents were dead, she said, so she called his stepmother to tell her.

Her son is still missing. She is weighing whether to go back to the morgue.

“We don’t give a damn about the politics. Whatever you are doing there, just give them back,” Chistyakova said. “If they were killed, give back their bodies.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.