Russia’s vanished combatants

Thousands of Russian servicemen are MIA in Ukraine. Most of them are likely dead, but their families can neither bury them nor file for state compensation.

Russia’s wartime casualties in Ukraine include a large class of personnel who are missing. Most of these troops have likely been killed, but their families can neither get ahold of their bodies nor file for the compensation promised by the state. Often, they try to find their loved ones through dedicated social media groups, and by querying hospitals, morgues, and the Defense Ministry. Novaya Gazeta Europe has analyzed 9,905 posts on the popular social network VKontakte (VK), discovering references to 1,365 Russian troops whose relatives are fruitlessly trying to locate them. Although this is only a fraction of all the missing army personnel, this limited data points to systemic problems in Russia’s military record-keeping.

In the absence of an official figure, experts can only estimate the total number of troops “missing in action” in Ukraine. Sergey Krivenko, head of the human-rights advocacy organization Citizen. Army. Law. believes that the actual total number of missing troops must be around 24,000. “Casualties classified as ‘MIA’ are mostly people who have been killed, but whose bodies could not be recovered. As of this moment, we know about 12,000 verified killed troops. The total number of troops missing is likely about twice that number.”

Krivenko’s estimate may be a reference to the statistics compiled by BBC News Russian jointly with Mediazona and a group of volunteers. By late January 2023, they had confirmed around 12,000 war dead, based on open sources. The project’s most recent data, however, speaks of 15,000 war dead. Based on Krivenko’s own formula, this might bump his estimate all the way up to 30,000 missing combatants.

Novaya Gazeta Europe has identified 1,365 Russian troops, based on close to 10,000 posts in dedicated VKontakte groups. Fifty of those servicemen, writes the publication, disappeared during the siege of Mariupol back in spring 2022. Another 40 stopped returning phone calls the following summer, during combat operations in the Luhansk region. In September, the number of casualties spiked to 170: most of them went MIA in the Donetsk region (where the hotspot of Bakhmut is located) or near Kharkiv (the location of Ukraine’s successful counteroffensive that month).

Another spike in disappearances was connected to Ukraine’s New Year’s Eve strike on the Russian military quarters in Makiivka. Shortly after the New Year, 18 different missing servicemen were mentioned in queries posted on VKontakte.

About half of the 1,365 people identified on VK last called their families from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, and another 125 called from the Kharkiv area. VK queries mention 93 contract servicemen, 92 members the “DNR” and “LNR” militias, and 89 volunteer conscripts. Draftees (40) and convicts recruited to go to war (28) are not as common among the VK sample.

Families often spend months trying to find their missing loved ones. In January, the same study points out, 850 notices about losing contact with deployed relatives were posted on VK. Every seventh post was about people who had been missing since the previous spring or summer. On average, missing servicemen from the VK sample spent 60 days at the front before their families lost contact with them.

Some Russians who vanished in combat are not even officially considered missing. A military spouse wrote, for example, about her husband, who had been wounded near Svatove and evacuated unconscious and without an ID badge or personal documents. She couldn’t get any information about him from the Defense Ministry hotline. He doesn’t figure in any lists. “He doesn’t pick up the phone, it’s impossible to reach his unit, and the draft office has offered no assistance,” she says. “We called all the hospitals, but there’s no one in their records by that name.”

Although the state pays a compensation of 12.5 million rubles (or about $166,500) to families whose members have been killed, people whose loved ones are MIA get neither compensation nor any official assistance in their search. Official MIA status, meanwhile, requires families to wait for two years after the end of the war before the missing family member can be declared dead, making the family eligible for compensation.

Military expert Kirill Mikhailov says that problems with military record-keeping have to do with staffing shortages. “While the Russian army grew bigger in size after mobilization, the size of its bureaucracy has remained the same.”

The human rights advocate Sergey Krivenko points out that in peacetime, military commanders have a duty to notify families about their casualties. But while in the combat zone, they cannot fulfill those duties, and no alternative notification method has been set up.