Russian courts flooded with 20,000 missing or dead claims in 2024. A huge portion of them filed by military commanders

In 2024, Russian courts received 20,000 claims to declare people missing or dead. This is 2.5 times more than a year before, when the situation was virtually no different from pre-war times (about 8,000 lawsuits per year across the country).Mediazona found out that most of these claims were filed by commanders of military units: they exclude soldiers who died in combat but whose death was not officially confirmed from personnel lists.The consent of relatives is not necessary to recognise a person as missing. And families are not always satisfied with such lawsuits, as they are left without money and without information about what happened to their loved ones.

“No one asked us anything—the trial was held without us”

Alexander Yazikov, a 48-year-old firefighter from Obninsk, went to war as a volunteer. He signed his contract in May 2023. Five months later he stopped calling home, his wife Yulia told Mediazona. There is no official information about what happened to Alexander—during all this time no one from the 488th Motorised Rifle Regiment, where he served, has not contacted his wife.

In June 2024, military unit No. 12721 in Klintsy filed a claim with the city court to recognize Yazikov as “missing”. The court’s website lists the unnamed “commander of unit 12721” as the “applicant,” while the the soldier’s wife, Yulia Yazikova, is listed as an “interested party.” The military commissions of the Kaluga and Bryansk regions, the social fund and the civil registry office in Obninsk, as well as the Russian Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Finance have the same status in the case.

Yazikova herself says that she didn’t intend to file such a claim—and does not believe in her husband’s death at all: “I have no grounds to file a lawsuit. I don't know anything, I don’t have any information at all about what happened there.”

“As far as I know, the law states that if there is no information about a missing person anywhere, they [the military unit] file a petition with the court to declare the person missing. They do this, again, as far as I know, to take the person out of [the unit’s] disposition,” she says, perplexed.

The presence of missing soldiers on unit personnel lists prevents commanders from recruiting new ones, as some of the decisions on such claims explicitly state.

Since the beginning of the war, the city court in Klintsy (which is the “home” court for the 488th Motorised Rifle Regiment) alone has already received more than two hundred such lawsuits. Since the summer of 2024, the claims have been coming in dozens per week.

Relatives of other missing soldiers from this regiment told Mediazona similar stories.

Elnur Babayev, an unemployed man from Moscow, decided to sign a contract with Russia’s Ministry of Defence in November 2023. According to his sister Esmeralda, it happened suddenly. On December 18, a month after his enlistment, he called home for the last time.

“And on December 23, my mom got a call from one of his fellow soldiers saying my brother was killed,” Esmeralda says. One of the soldiers who was out on a mission with Babayev and came back saw everything. He said a sniper hit him and he fell.

Babayev’s relatives called the hotline at the Ministry of Defence and his military unit 12721. But they were unable to find out where and how he died.

“My mom went to the unit herself, to Bryansk. They said he was missing, and that was it,” Esmeralda says. “The commander wouldn't even speak with her: she was told that he was busy, and then he got into the car and left.”

In August 2024, Babaev’s relatives found a notice from the Klintsy City Court of the Bryansk region in their mailbox, and in October the soldier was declared “missing.” The family learned about this from a copy of the ruling, which was also sent to them by mail. The relatives don’t know what to do in order for Babaev to be recognized as dead, and there is no contact with the military unit.

“I can’t even reach the court by phone now, to find out about what to do next, how to do it, documents and everything,” Esmeralda says.

As a general rule, a person can be declared missing (“whereabouts unknown”) if they haven’t been home for more than a year, and dead if they haven’t been home for more than five years. The exception is when a person goes missing in “circumstances of mortal threat,” in which case they can be declared dead after six months.

In the spring of 2023, a simplified procedure was adopted for all participants in the invasion of Ukraine, including those who disappeared before this decree had been signed. Servicemen can be declared missing six months after they’d been last seen, rather than a year. Then, when the court recognises the person as missing, after another three months it is possible to apply to the court a second time and declare them dead.

But if the military unit (or someone else) can produce for the court “a document of the established form, containing information about the circumstances of the disappearance or possible death of a citizen,” after six months, a lawsuit can be filed immediately to declare the person dead, bypassing the “missing” stage.

Lyudmila Gudilina, a retiree from Kursk, shows Mediazona pictures of the resolution of the Klintsy City Court to declare her 32-year-old son Yuri “missing.” The court carried out this decision on 28 October 2024. The document begins with the phrase “the commander of military unit 12721 appealed to the court,” but the name of the applicant is not specified.

“On 11 February 2024, Gudilin went missing, presumably killed. Establishing the fact of Gudilin’s unknown whereabouts is necessary for his exclusion from the personnel lists,” the document states.

The family received notification of this trial in August 2024. As in other cases, the hearing was held without their participation.

“Nobody asked us anything, the trial was held without us,” Gudilin’s sister Anastasia told Mediazona. “We repeatedly sent them requests to have the trial held in our city or at least by video call, but our court did not approve it. I called the court: ‘No, you don’t need to do anything, the unit has already filed the documents and if you say that he [the serviceman] is not at home, we will do everything without you.’ And in the end, everything went through without us.”

Gudilin was recruited to the war from Penal Colony No. 5 in the Orel region in December 2022. Since 11 February 2023, he stopped calling home.

“We sounded the alarm ourselves, he didn’t contact us for a long time,” Anastasia says. “And I got in touch with a guy who shared a dugout with him. The guy told me that my brother had been declared missing [in the unit].”

The family has tried many times to contact the commander of unit 12721, but “he flat out doesn’t answer,” she says. The family of the missing soldier never learned the name of his superior, because the commanders in the unit are constantly changing. “There was one, then another one, then a third,” Lyudmila Gudilina sneers.

Anastasia says she found the phone number of “deputy morale officer Chernov” in chat rooms, who confirmed to her that Yuri went missing at the front.

“He told me that after six months of his absence, an application would be filed with the court to have him recognized by the court as missing,” she recalls. “He said, ‘You can go to court and prevent the unit from declaring him MIA. But there have to be serious grounds for that: he should be at home, or you have to know where he actually is. You can’t just do that because you ‘don’t want to.’”

Missing payments

The relatives of “missing” servicemen are left with almost no support from the state. Unit commanders are quick enough to remove the MIA soldiers from their assigned positions—so they no longer receive “front-line” pay, and the family can count on the usual army salary of several tens of thousands of rubles instead of a couple of hundred thousand.

The military unit then files a claim to permanently remove a soldier from the personnel list. The command can report the person either missing or dead. In both cases, the family stops receiving the soldier’s allowance immediately after the court decision.

If the unit filed a claim that the serviceman was missing rather than killed, the family cannot immediately claim payments of several million roubles for the death. A separate court decision is needed to declare a person dead.

Relatives of servicemen from the 488th Motorised Rifle Regiment interviewed by Mediazona said that the unit filed missing person claims—and therefore they have not received any payments yet.

“There was his January [2023] salary of over 200 thousand,” says Lyudmila Gudilina, the mother of the MIA soldier Yuri Gudilin. “Then some more money for February... and after that they paid 30 thousand monthly—until he was declared missing. And that’s it, they haven’t paid me anything since then. Now we have to go to court ourselves this February to have him killed in action. And only then will they pay some money.”

MIA and KIA: what we know about the types of claims

Missing persons claims and death claims are combined into one general category on court websites, so it is impossible to separate one from the other without the full text of the decision. Which are only published in 10% of cases.

Mediazona calculated that until 2024, the number of missing and dead cases was almost equal. To do this, we analysed the essence of the lawsuit from 4,287 published decisions using regular expressions.

In 2024, only 1,190 decisions were published: 61% of them on declaring a person dead and 39% on declaring a person missing. However, such data, due to the small number of decisions, is easily distorted if courts, for whatever reason, post some texts more often than others.

The majority of published decisions on recognizing a person as dead in 2024 are the decisions of courts in the Tula and Tambov regions, which, at the initiative of the prosecutor’s office, are massively issuing decisions on soldiers who died back in the World War II.

There are barely any published decisions on the disappearance and death of modern-day soldiers. Of more than a thousand available texts for 2024, only 81 fall into this category: these are lawsuits from commanders of military units. Of these, in 58% of cases commanders asked to declare soldiers missing, and in 42%—dead.

Artyom Klyga, lawyer of the Movement of Conscientious Objectors to military service in Russia, and amother military lawyer (who asked to remain anonymous) told Mediazona that they have not yet encountered relatives who for material reasons would refuse to officially recognise their relative as “missing” or dead.

“Mostly people have other goals in mind when they’re being stubborn,” says the anonymous military lawyer. “They wrongly assume that as long as a soldier is considered ‘missing in action’ the authorities will be looking for him better. And when he’s declared dead, they’ll stop looking. It’s a misconception. No one is looking for them anyways.”

Mediazona was able to find a case in which the wife of a soldier who went missing on the front defended the right to receive his salary. The military unit 12721 in Klintsy is now trying to recognise the mobilized husband of Veronika Tsyt from Bryansk as MIA for the third time.

Having received a notice from the court, Tsyt consulted a lawyer and filed a counter petition. As a result, the court in Klintsy left the case without consideration.

“My spouse has a dependent minor who receives his allowance,” Tsyt told Mediazona. “This poses grounds for a dispute, and the court has the right to leave the case without consideration. If my spouse were legally recognised as missing, he would be removed from the military unit and his allowance would cease to be paid. <...> What good would that do me? I don’t know of a way I could look for my spouse, plus I will lose my status and payments.”

The total salary of Veronika’s husband, who disappeared in the war, is 26,000 roubles, including pay for rank and appointment. If the court recognised him officially “missing,” the family would only be entitled to a survivor’s pension, which is significantly lower. ”16,000, as I was told,” Tsyt clarifies.

While the mobilised man was serving, he was also entitled to an additional 158,000 rubles, but those payments stopped as as soon as the husband stopped calling home, Tsyt says.

“They were sent on a mission, and they didn't come back. The commander of the military unit immediately issued a decree based on which he removed the servicemen from their posts,” she adds.

According to Tsyt, the military unit “cannot even provide information,” so she intends to appeal to the military prosecutor’s office.

“They [command of the unit] constantly have someone changing, someone leaving, someone sick,” says the woman. “If the military unit believes that they needed my husband at the time of mobilisation, then they should fulfill their obligations to find him and bring him home. And not just cross him off their lists—and leave you on your own.”

Claims all over Russia

The situation with court activity of the Klintsy 488th Regiment is far from unique. Mediazona has studied all the claims for recognition as missing or dead in all Russian courts and found out that a purge of military personnel lists has started all over the country.

In 2024, the courts received a record 20,040 claims to recognise a person as missing or dead. This is more than twice as many as in 2023 (8,591 claims).

In 2022, the number of such claims was no different from the pre-war level: about 8,000 per year across Russia.

Approximately 5,000 cases of 2024 unambiguously state that the applicants in them are related to the army. In such cases, the claim is filed either by the commander of the military unit or involves military prosecutors, military enlistment offices or the Ministry of Defence directly.

Before the start of the full-scale war and in 2022, there were just dozens of such lawsuits from the military; in 2023, the total number was about 500.

However, the courts often conceal the names and positions of the applicants. This was true even in the prewar years: historically, this field is hidden in about one in three such petitions in court databases.

In 2024, the number of concealed applicants for missing or dead person claims increased two and a half times from 2023, from 2,986 to 7,832. The rise in the number of claims filed by unnamed applicants is also due to the activity of military commanders, Mediazona found.

The Oktyabrsky District Court of the Rostov region on the border with Ukraine, where many military units are stationed, received the most number of claims to declare a person missing in 2024: 1,243 such appeals were filed here, with about 300 in October and December each. There was no such activity in previous years.

All applicants for these claims are hidden on the court’s website, but Anna Velishchenko, assistant to the chairman of the Oktyabrsky District Court, confirmed in a conversation with Mediazona that they are military. The reason is territorial jurisdiction: lawsuits come from units located on the territory of Oktyabrsky district of the Rostov region.

Velishchenko added that appeals from relatives, “in practice, are few.”

This statement is also confirmed by the data studied by Mediazona across Russia: in 2024, individuals (the “applicant” field mentions only a person’s full name - for example, a relative) filed about 6,000 such lawsuits, compared to 4,300 in 2023.

In total, Mediazona found more than 6,000 claims for 2024 that are clearly related to missing military personnel. This is half of all “new” lawsuits in the past year.

An equal number of cases are classified and scattered over various courts. They, too, did not begin to appear until the second half of 2024—and most likely involve missing soldiers as well.

Assault aftermath

Thanks to the cases in which the claimant is not hidden, it is possible to determine which military units reported missing soldiers more often than others.

The most claims were submitted by unit 91704, which is the 254th Motorised Rifle Regiment, a part of the 144th Motorised Rifle Division. According to the data on the KIA Russian soldiers collected by Mediazona, in 2024 the soldiers of the 254th were advancing in the Liman direction. In October 2024, the Ukrainian military told journalists that Russian troops here were trying to “advance even one bush forward” with continuous assaults.

“The daytime [assaults] are absolutely idiotic: the infantry has to go across an open field. Mainly, these are contract soldiers who found themselves under the threat of imprisonment for some petty crimes,” claimed Rostislav Yashishin, press officer of the 63rd separate mechanized brigade of the AFU.

Russian sources (e.g., the Rybar Telegram channel run by a former employee of the Defence Ministry’s press service) reported successes in this area by early 2025.

The 488th Regiment, which also belongs to the 144th Division and was also on the offensive in the Liman direction, holds the second place in claims. “For the period of 2024, assault groups of the 488th Guards Motorised Rifle Regiment of the 144th Division, 20th Combined Arms Army, conducted an offensive against AFU positions near the settlements of Makeyevka and Nevskoye on the Liman direction of the front,” the Russian Z-project AmalNews writes.

A researcher from the Conflict Intelligence Team in a conversation with Mediazona reminded that the 254th and the 488th were also involved in the defence of the Kursk region: “There was a rather complicated structure there, but formally servicemen were assigned to these regiments. Some of the missing soldiers may have originated from there. In general, you can’t say the Liman direction is particularly hot, although the conditions in terms of terrain there are quite difficult. The fighting in the southern Donbass is much more serious in scale.”

According to the CIT researcher, there are two possible explanations for such a number of claims from these regiments: “First of all, in the areas where the 254th and 488th were fighting in 2024, the front basically stood still. Advances, if any, were minimal. So all those [bodies] that remained lying in the gray zone were lying there. Unlike the areas where Russia was steadily advancing and thus could pick up the dead over time. Secondly, this is just voluntarism of the division commander: like, everyone in the division must write off as many missing fighters as possible.”

The 7th Military Base in Abkhazia (unit 09932) holds the third place. The participation of servicemen of the 7th Base in the invasion of Ukraine has been known since 2022. “They are quite active now, like in the area of Bakhmut-Kurdiumivka-Klishchiivka, also with minimal advances and a high number of MIA,” says the CIT researcher. “If you search for the number of the unit in VKontakte, you can see that a lot of people have been looking for missing soldiers in 2024.”

The 1428th Motorised Rifle Regiment is also on the list. It was formed in 2022 from soldiers who’ve been mobilised from the north of the European part of Russia. Servicemen from this regiment in 2023 recorded several video messages about being sent to suicidal assaults near Bakhmut instead of Wagner PMC. Now, according to CIT’s observations, they are fighting near Terny.

“I don’t think the number of missing persons being written off is directly related to the casualty rate. If that were the case, units of the Central Military District that are advancing from Avdiivka would also be on the list: they should have the highest casualties. So this is most likely a combination of the intensity of the fighting and the lack of change in the front line,” says the CIT analyst.

By the end of January 2025, the press services of courts across Russia drew attention to the large number of claims of missing or dead soldiers: they began publishing press releases about such appeals from the relatives of soldiers.

Editor: Maxim Litavrin

Infographics and data: Sergei Golubev