Since the beginning of the Russian Federation’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine, 26 thousand people have been declared missing without a trace, of which 15 thousand are military, according to the data presented by the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, Leonid Timchenko, during a television show, quoted by UNIAN.
Ukrainian artillerymenPhoto: AA / Abaca Press / Profimedia Images
Timcenko stated that every missing person is registered and a register is kept. “We are cooperating with the National Police of Ukraine and the Main Intelligence Administration which is coordinating the search operations,” he added.
News portal Jellyfish writes that in May 2023, Oleg Kotenko, the Ukrainian commissioner for missing persons under special circumstances, reported that the data of 23,700 people, including civilians and military, whose disappearances were reported by relatives, were recorded in the automatic register. Kotenko pointed out at the time that this represented the total number of records, including for people whose locations had already been established, in which case it said “found.” At the time, according to Kotenko, there were about 7,000 records for military personnel in the registry “We expect that the people we are looking for as missing persons are still in captivity,” he said.
In early October, the Telegram channel Verstka noted that Russia and Ukraine have conducted much rarer prisoner exchanges in the past few months. Between March and September 2023, according to the cited source, Russia and Ukraine carried out only nine exchanges of prisoners of war, while in the first year of the full force invasion there were 40 such exchanges. In total, since the start of the invasion, Ukraine has returned about 2,500 of its citizens in exchanges, while Russia has returned about 1,500.
