Frustrating and often fruitless: The 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 Chyakova 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.
Chyakova 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 Minry of Defense 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.
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 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,” Chyakova, 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 Minry of Defense 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 minry of defense 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 miner of defense, 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 Sept. 30.
More than 4,000 people are led as missing soldiers, Kotenko said, although he estimated that up to 15% of those were civilians.
In Russia, the absence of any workable official system has prompted parents to organise on their own. Countless chatrooms have sprung up — often focused on soldiers deployed from a particular region or specific units.
Although the chatrooms act as a kind of nationwide support group, they also seethe with frustration, acrimony and mrust. Suspicions abound that some participants are Ukrainian spies seeking to exploit information about soldiers.
A chatroom 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 Minry of Defense 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 15.
Shumova managed to piece together some of what happened talking to soldiers from Vladimir’s reconnaissance unit. She knows that he was with a group of armored 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 anymore,” 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 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 Minry of Defense 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.
Chyakova, the mother of Kirill, said she has no love lost for the Ukrainians, nor for the Russian military. She sees the war as an exential battle with the West, echoing the narrative promoted 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 the relatives of more than 100 missing. (The letter was first reported Radio Free Europe’s Russian service.) Chyakova then decided to search herself. She traveled to the morgue in Rostov-on-Don, arriving just before Aug. 26, 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 psycholog hovers near, 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. Chyakova 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. Chyakova even braved crossing into the war zone, to Donetsk, where one mother had found her son in the morgue.
In Rostov, Chyakova 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 3, 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.
After her first day, she sat under the stars on a darkened residential sidewalk in the city, weeping and praying.
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,” Chyakova said. “If they were killed, give back their bodies.”
The family of Vladimir Veselov, 36, had last heard from the contract soldier about May 16 and endured a month of silence before they began to look for him.
His ser Elena said that she called the hotline and was told repeatedly that Vladimir did not appear on any “negative ls,” the euphemism for those confirmed killed, wounded or missing. Sleuthing among her brother’s fellow soldiers led her to his unit’s field medic, code-named Scalpel.
An exploding tank shell had seriously wounded Vladimir in the head near Kharkiv, Scalpel told her. The medic had evacuated Vladimir to a hospital in Belgorod and had not seen him since.
Elena began calling military hospitals in Belgorod and beyond. Toward the end of August, someone at Burdenko Hospital in Moscow, considered Russia’s best military hospital, told her that the intensive care patients included an unidentified soldier in a vegetative state. He sported a dinctive tattoo on his upper left arm, a large, winged dragon, and the hospital sent her a photograph of it. She had found her brother.
Although his eyes are open, he doesn’t recognise anyone and only responds to pain, she said. Surgeons removed part of his brain and have rated his chances for improving as minimal.
She is glad to have found him alive but is still alarmed his condition and the general cavalier attitude toward finding the missing.
“I do not understand why they are treated like this — like they are abandoned and no one cares about them, no one is counting them if they are missing. Oh, well, never mind — I am shocked it,” she said.