Yevheniia Mekh holds a photograph of her husband standing with 10 comrades from his unit in the Ukrainian army. They smile for the camera, holding their weapons and looking ready for action.
Mekh says only three of the men are known to still be alive, one is confirmed dead and seven are missing – including her husband Yakiv Stryzhykon, a combat medic who disappeared during battles with Russian troops near the small city of Avdiivka in the Donetsk region around October 1st, 2023.
Ukraine’s official register of people who have gone missing in “special circumstances” now includes about 63,000 soldiers and civilians, the vast majority of whom vanished amid fighting and occupation of parts of the country since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
“We can’t find him in lists of prisoners held by the Russians or of those killed in action. The Russians say they know nothing and there is no information from the Ukrainian side,” says Mekh. “If the Russians have his body then they should send it back, and if he is alive in captivity they should let us know, so we can have contact. This lack of information is terribly painful.”
Europe’s biggest war since 1945 has laid waste to swathes of eastern Ukraine and left tens of thousands of families in the dark over the fate of loved ones who did not come back from the battlefield.
“We’ve never had conflicts with the authorities. We support the Ukrainian government and we understand that sometimes they cannot get bodies back from Russian-controlled territory – but we want them to be more open with us about what is happening,” says Hanna Kravchenko, whose husband was killed on the front line in summer 2023 and whose brother disappeared during fighting in spring 2022.
“We understand this is war and what can happen, and if our relatives have been killed then we want to be told the truth. We want [Ukrainian authorities] to be in proper contact with us and not to be told fairy tales about how they’re working hard and helping us, when in fact we have no proper contact or information.”
Mekh and Kravchenko, who are from the eastern city of Poltava, are among hundreds of women who regularly rally in towns around Ukraine and in central Kyiv to demand more transparency about missing soldiers and more action to bring home prisoners of war and the bodies of the fallen.
“Relatives of soldiers from nearly all brigades take part in our rallies on Maidan,” Kravchenko says in reference to Kyiv’s Independence Square, a traditional place of protest that was at the heart of two pro-democracy revolutions in Ukraine.
“Our groups discuss everything and send petitions to government bodies, to the president and elsewhere,” she says. “We’re like a family now because we have gone through so much together.”
Desperate for information, many Ukrainians comb through Russian news resources and social media for a possible glimpse of a missing relative or a mention of their name, and seek help from volunteer groups in Ukraine and Russia.
“You can spend 24 hours a day scrolling through Telegram, Facebook and other channels, looking for some information,” says Mekh.
“It was scary work at the start, but now we’re used to it,” Kravchenko says of the task of searching through pictures of prisoners of war and of dead and injured soldiers in search of a missing relative.
“Some people have found things out this way. If we see someone we recognise in a photo or video, we send a screenshot or download to the Ukrainian authorities. They do accept that kind of material and say they’re working on it,” she says. “It feels like there’s no other way of finding our guys … Relatives are doing all this on their own, basically.”
The searchers’ plight makes them vulnerable to scammers in both Russia and Ukraine.
“People on both sides are trying to get money from relatives who are ready to do anything, to pay any money, to get a relative back or just get some information,” says Kravchenko.
“Some people searching for missing loved ones put their phone numbers or email addresses online. Then they are contacted by fraudsters saying their relative is in captivity or something. They approach you that way. And they post links that are scams.”
Many people also turn to so-called mediums who claim to possess powers that can help in the search. “That happens all the time,” says Mekh.
Kravchenko says prisoner exchanges between the warring sides bring “a ray of hope that someone who is released may have seen your loved one”, but describes the numbers of soldiers freed and bodies returned to Ukraine as a “drop in the ocean” of the thousands who are missing.
Many Russians are also searching for missing relatives and face additional obstacles from an authoritarian system that since 2022 has charged more than 10,000 people with making comments that “discredit the armed forces”.
Ukraine said in January that more than 50,000 requests about missing Russians had been received by a Ukrainian telephone and online service called “I Want to Find”, which is an offshoot of the “I Want To Live” hotline that Russian troops can use to surrender.
Olha Reshetylova, Ukraine’s presidential commissioner for the protection of the rights of military personnel and their families, says her country has built “comprehensive infrastructure” to address issues around missing persons and prisoners of war.
Holding back a much bigger invader has stretched all of Ukraine’s resources, however, and the scale and intensity of the fighting puts huge strain on state agencies, causing delays that are exacerbated by gaps in a DNA database of soldiers that Ukraine uses to identify remains recovered from the battlefield or received from Russia.
“This creates tension in society, as relatives have to wait a long time for information about their missing loved ones,” says Reshetylova.
“Unfortunately, the search for missing persons may continue for not just years, but possibly even decades. Therefore, Ukraine is building up its infrastructure, drawing on international experience, and the International Commission on Missing Persons, headquartered in The Hague, is actively working in Ukraine. They are assisting our country, particularly in matters of complex body identification cases.”
Kyiv also struggles to get information on the number, identity, whereabouts and welfare of Ukrainian soldiers held by Russia, and on many thousands of Ukrainian civilians who are believed to be held in prisons and unofficial detention centres in Russia and occupied parts of Ukraine.
[ ICC issues arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin over alleged war crimesOpens in new window ]
Kyiv says about 20,000 children have also been illegally transferred from Ukraine to Russia, and in 2023 the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian president Vladimir Putin and his children’s ombudsman Maria Lvova-Belova over their alleged role in the war crime.
As the United States pushes for an end to the war, Kyiv says the return of all Ukrainian prisoners and children from Russia are top priorities.
But even if a lasting peace can be forged, Reshetylova says Ukraine will still face the long and daunting task of identifying all those killed in Russia’s invasion.
“That is why it is very important that during any negotiations with Russia, issues such as the release of prisoners of war, the release of civilian hostages and the search for missing persons’ bodies are raised.”
