Russian soldiers reported missing in Ukraine have been at the front for less than two months on average, Novaya Gazeta reports in a wide-ranging investigation into Moscow’s missing soldiers.

In the more than 12 months since the start of the “special military operation” on February 24 last year, a large number of Russian soldiers are considered missing, probably killed during the fighting in Ukraine.

Relatives did not receive dead bodies for burial, some tried to find their loved ones on their own. He calls hospitals and morgues, requests an answer from the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, and posts wanted notices on extremely popular social networks and Telegram channels in Russia.

“Nova Gazeta Evropa” analyzed 9,905 posts in the five largest VKontakte groups (the Russian equivalent of Facebook), where relatives are looking for missing people in the war zone.

Of them, 1,365 are about the military of Russia and the self-proclaimed “people’s republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk. Officially, the number of missing Russian servicemen is unknown, as well as the actual number of dead.

“Missing people are mostly dead people whose bodies have not been found. At the moment, we know about 12,000 confirmed dead. The number of missing persons is most likely twice as high,” says Serhiy Kryvenko, head of a human rights non-governmental organization.

After analyzing almost 10,000 publications about their search, “Novaya Gazeta” discovered several patterns of disappearances among the Russian military.

Most of the Russian military have gone missing in eastern Ukraine

The newspaper of Dmitry Muratov, one of two journalists to be awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, has identified 50 soldiers whose relatives were looking for in VK after they disappeared during the siege of the port city of Mariupol last spring.

In the summer, during the fighting in the Luhansk region, another 40 Russian soldiers stopped communicating with their relatives. In September, the number of wanted persons on social networks increased sharply: 170 soldiers went missing in a month, most of them in Donetsk region (where the only offensive of the Russian army in Ukraine is still underway) and Kharkiv (where the Russian front is located). crashed catastrophically in September).

“Novaya Gazeta” connected the next wave of searches for missing Russian soldiers with the Ukrainian HIMARS attack on the barracks in the city of Makiivka on New Year’s Eve.

About half of the 1,365 Russian soldiers wanted by the Central Intelligence Agency are missing in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. Among the missing, whose status has been clarified by investigators, are mainly contract servicemen (93 people), soldiers of two separatist republics (92 people) and Russian volunteers (89 people).

Missing conscripts after the decree on partial mobilization (40 people) and prisoners recruited from Russian prisons (28 people) are searched for significantly less often, Novaya Gazeta reports.

Relatives often cannot find the missing for months: Last month, the number of posts about servicemen who had lost contact with their relatives was six times higher than in March 2022, the first full month of the war.

Every seventh post was devoted to the search for servicemen who went missing last spring or summer.

The missing Russian soldiers stayed at the front for less than two months

Also, “Nova Gazeta Evropa” calculated how long, on average, a soldier spent in a combat zone before his relatives lost contact with him: 60 days.

However, some Russian servicemen whose relatives can no longer be contacted do not officially have the status of missing persons. For example, the wife of a soldier named Boris Felitsyn wrote in one of the VKontakte groups that, according to a friend, her husband was wounded in a battle near Svatov in the Luhansk region and was evacuated from the battlefield unconscious, without documents and tokens. .

“On the hotline of the Ministry of Defense, there are no lists of wounded, killed and missing persons. Do not contact, it is impossible to contact the unit, the Military Commissariat refused to help. I called hospitals, but this last name is not transferred,” said the wife.

Relatives of servicemen who do not have the status of missing cannot count on the help of the Ministry of Defense in finding them or compensation.

Serhiy Kryvenko recalls that “during the Chechen wars, soldiers’ mothers simply went to Chechnya, met with militants and searched for their sons alone.”

“Now, of course, there is no such possibility. There are several cases when Ukrainians managed to identify the body and hand it over to relatives, but from the ministry [rus] We do not see the desire of the Ministry of Defense to organize a full-fledged search for missing persons and to cooperate with their relatives,” he said.

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