For months, Elvira Kaipova had not heard anything of her son Rafael, a Russian soldier deployed in Ukraine.
Military officers answered her repeated questions about his place of residence by saying that he was in active service and therefore incommunicado. When, at the end of November, two days after they had made that claim again, she heard that he was missing on November 1 – of a telegram channel that helps military families.
“We lost your son,” said Aleksandr Sokolov, the officer in the unit of Rafael who was responsible for family business, when she traveled to his headquarters in western Russia.
“Lost him how?” She says she answered, alarmed and angry, especially when the officer explained that after Rafael had not checked in by the radio, a search was impossible. “How do we look for him?” She says the officer told her.
Variations on that grim scenario repeated his countless times since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The Russian Ministry of Defense misses formal, organized efforts to trace legions of missing soldiers, according to robbed families, private organizations trying to help them and military analysts. Family members, fixed in the uncertain, take care of themselves with scarce government information.
The ministry itself refused to comment on this article. Mr. Sokolov, the connecting officer, said in an SMS: “You realize that I don’t comment on anything.”
Even if Russia and Ukraine reach a peace agreement, the hunt for missing soldiers is expected to be for years, if not decades.
The Ministry of Defense has not published statistics about the number of missing, which, according to military analysts and families, say because it does not know the number. Estimates walk to the tens of thousands.
Anna Tsivilyova, a Vice Minister of Defense and a cousin of President Vladimir V. Putin, told the state of Duma last November that 48,000 family members of the missing DNA samples had submitted to identify remaining remaining, although that included some double requests from the same family.
In Ukraine, “wanting to find,” said a government project to help find or killed Russian soldiers there that it had received more than 88,000 requests for information in April, with more than 9,000. It noted that the total number is still unknown.
The international committee of the Red Cross, which tries to find the missing of both parties, whether citizens or soldiers have submitted 110,000 cases.
The family of Isakhanov Ravazan, a 25-year-old soldier, received a short ballot for him on November 9 for the last time. During a fight shortly thereafter, his aunt said, he radioed his commander that he could not hide the bleeding from a bad wound. He has not been heard since then.
“Nobody saw him dead,” said his aunt, who, like different people in this article, did not want to be mentioned for fear of falling laws against the detailing of battlefield losses. “Maybe he saved himself, maybe someone has found him, we still keep the hope he lives,” she said. “There is no peace for the soul. I can’t sleep at night, and not his parents either.”
Most missing soldiers probably died fighting and were abandoned on the battlefield, experts said. There are not enough teams to collect bodies, and the constant deployment of drones makes the collection too dangerous.
Commanders have enough difficulty in making food and ammunition, and that is the priority, said a military analyst in the conflict information team, an independent organization in exile that follows the conflict. The analyst, who refused to use his name to prevent family members from being in danger in Russia, said that only families of the soldiers have care when bodies are collected, “and there is no punishment for the alienation of family members.”
A Ukrainian man from the occupied city of Luhansk, who was employed as a battlefield medicine and who also refused to be identified, said about his experience: “Hundreds of people stayed there. Dozens of injured or killed every day.”
Even when bodies are collected, identification is problematic. Often remains can only be removed after the combat lines shift considerably, so that attack drones fly somewhere else, and that can take months or even years.
The Military Morue In the western city of Rostov, officially known as the Center for the reception, processing and shipping of the deceased, the most important clearing center is.
When she heard that her son was missing, Mrs. Kaipova, who is married and has another son, first flew. “Everything is overcrowded,” she said, arrival at 7 am to submit a DNA monster and at 10 p.m. “women, mothers, fathers leave – all cry, sob, wait.”
Researchers there told her and others that they are confronted with a backlog of approximately 15,000 non -created soldiers. The slow pace, the constant references to different government agencies and the lack of basic information has families of killing on a slow boil. Anger flows from numerous online chat rooms where family members seek help.
In one remark about the Vkontakt Social Network, a participant called Polina Medvedeva shot Military commanders as ‘irresponsible’. Some comrades of her husband told her that he had died heroic, she wrote, but the army has not confirmed his death and there is no body.
“Where are the details?” She wrote. “Why ignores us, avoids answers and throws us from one from one to the other? My heart breaks with pain and anger for what they have done to our family.”
Some families go even more public.
Family members of missing soldiers from the 25th Guards motorized rifle brigade from the Leningrad region have repeatedly appealed.
“Everywhere we come across indifference!” she said In a video last month with photos of the missing. Each family receives exactly the same form letter and is just told repeatedly to wait, they said, “Help us! We are tired of living in ignorance for months and years!”
The Kremlin founded the defenders of the Fatherland State Foundation, apparently to help soldiers, veterans and their families. But it has no internal track on details about the missing, analysts said.
There is “no contact system with the soldiers’ families,” says Sergei Krivenko, the director of a human rights organization that was established to help soldiers. He called the Fatherland Foundation a ‘fake structure’, designed to blame the Ministry of Defense and ‘to give an apparent action’.
The Fatherland Foundation did not respond to requests for comments.
Mrs. Kaipova has written to countless officials who start with Mr Putin, visited his administrative office and searched for by several hospitals, including some in the midst of the fighting in East -Ukraine. “I run in circles,” she said.
Her search took a not unusual turn when she thought she recognized Rafael with a serious head wound in a short video clip filmed on board an evacuation helicopter. She is convinced that he is in a hospital struck somewhere in memory loss.
The manager of one chat group where she placed the video said that at least 20 other people identified the same man as their missing soldier.
“Everyone is so desperate that they see their loved ones in every face,” admitted Mrs. Kaipova, but rejected every suggestion that this could also be for her. Her son’s unity said that the doctors have not reported on evacuating him.
Rafael was a reserved soldier. Raised in the central city of Tyumen, he seriously injured another man trying to take his car. Officials presented him a common choice in Russian criminal cases: go to prison or forward. His mother begged him to choose the prison, but he withdrew. “He was in pain, pacing,” she said. “He didn’t want war or prison.”
He started his 20th birthday last August 1. She never heard of him again. A soldier of his unit admitted to the hospital once called to tell her that Rafael had shouted for his mother at the start of his first fight.
She learned from form 1421, the short military report of his disappearance that he served with an intelligence unit. Rafael was one of a group of soldiers who performed ‘special tasks’ in a village of Donetsk Province, when they came under fire from Artillery and Drones. “The group, including Rafael Kaipov, lost contact after this engagement.”
According to new laws, commanding officials can go to court only six months after the last contact with a soldier to miss him, so that they can stop his battle wage.
The families themselves must submit an extra case to have the missing soldier dead, which releases significant benefits. Some avoid such a definitive step.
“I constantly cry, morning and night,” said Mrs. Kaipova. “My biggest fear is that I will exhaust every lead and not let anyone go to go.”
Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.
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