Translated material
“Skeletons have been lying in the fields for months.” Missing in action during the war against Ukraine
According to Mediazona , as of January 29, 2026, the deaths of 177,433 Russian military personnel were confirmed. But the real death toll is obviously much higher. From the first months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, chats began to appear on networks in search of missing Russian servicemen. Their loved ones in these chats share their experience of searching, write to various authorities, cut off the “hotline” of the Ministry of Defense, but usually receive a standard answer: wait, no information has been received.
“And that’s it, there was no more connection”
Marina Smirnova (name changed for security reasons) She has been looking for her fiancé Alexander for three months now. During this time, she contacted the relatives of 36 of his dead colleagues and found out their call signs. They are all in November 2025 left for the assault and did not return. Alexander was then 21 years old.
– He left to serve in the army as a conscript in 2023. They were taken to the border, to the Belgorod region. He didn’t sign any contract, never planned to serve in the Northern Military District (as Russian propaganda calls Russia’s war against Ukraine - SR) , or to have anything to do with this at all. He stayed there for 8 months, returned home, we began to live together, we established a common life together - young, full of strength and energy, as they say. He trained to be an oil worker, we have the Yamalo-Nenets District, there is an oil industry here, a lot of people work in the fields. And he was already working in his profession, everything was stable,” Marina recalls.
And then he adds that Alexander “failed to cope.”
“Serving in Belgorod, under shelling, really broke him. He returned from there in December (2024), the New Year holidays began, people set off fireworks, but he could neither sleep nor eat. It seemed to him that these were arrivals, and every night in his sleep he began to get ready somewhere. Apparently he was having panic attacks. During this period he saw many torn and mutilated people. As a result, I didn’t even stay at home for a year - I signed a contract in November and left. We didn’t even sign – there was no time for that, he had work, I had school. He was taken to the training ground for a week and a half, and from there to Lugansk. They said - you will go to the assault unit and will also be in the reconnaissance group. I’m in tears, hysterical, I beg him - let’s pay him off, it’s a one-way ticket.
She admits that she even tried to collect some money, but did not have time. In general, according to her, “everyone is paid off.”
“If you pay well, you can serve in a completely different way.” And I asked him about it, but it was already too late. On the night of November 27, before leaving for his mission, he wrote to everyone, both me and his mother, that he would try to return, he loved everyone. We sat and waited, nothing happened for a day. On November 28, a message arrives: “Alive.” That's all. I immediately started to cry, let’s ask, he said in one word: “Damn.” And one more thing: “I don’t have much time, there’s an assault tomorrow. I’ll try to write.” And that’s it, there was no more connection.
Marina knew the number of his military unit and found the political officer.
– All December I asked him about the status of the fighter, he told me: “The status is active, he is not on any lists, everything is fine.” Well, I’m sitting, calmly waiting—on a combat mission, that is. And suddenly, on December 31, a message comes that he has been listed as missing since November 29, but someone in the unit missed the order, and we were not notified. I contacted the Defender of the Fatherland Foundation , their supervisor advised us. His mother donated DNA, we are waiting for him to be entered into the database.
They wrote statements to the Alexander military unit, the Ministry of Defense, the Investigative Committee, and the military prosecutor's office with requests to help find the missing person. There are no answers.
“My mother-in-law and I shared responsibilities. She handled the paperwork as an official relative. And I’m more interested in searching for information, on all sorts of sites. I found his colleagues and contacted the relatives of the same missing people. Together we collect and compare everything bit by bit, discuss who has what is written in the notice. Many people have their names and surnames spelled incorrectly, and their data is mixed up. That is, they cannot even draw up documents correctly. I don't know what to think.
At the same time, she does not want to talk about her attitude to the war.
– This is very difficult for me. I don't get into it.
And then she says that in the very first days of mobilization , her father was also taken away.
“Soon he stopped communicating, and he was declared missing. 5 months pass, and suddenly he calls from the hospital. I, he says, lay in a coma, I was shell-shocked and wounded. He was given time to recover and was taken back. I feel that Alexander is alive too. His mother and I decided that we would not go to court to declare him dead. We don't care about coffins. We will believe that he is alive and search.
"They've been looking for people since 2023"
Dmitry (name changed for security reasons) For several months now he has been looking for his uncle, 47-year-old Sergei Ivanov, who lived in the Tula region and went missing in the fall of 2025.
“At the military registration and enlistment office, a polite woman advises what and how to do, where to go, but only about payments. But life is not worth any money. This week I will bring them a package of documents, I hope I will find out at least some more information. I try to search myself as best I can, through chats on VK and Telegram. I look through messages, posts, looking for something to latch on to. And I publish my posts. I’m texting someone, exchanging information. I’m looking at the photo, hoping to see him somewhere, with someone. Friends help too. Applications were sent to the Red Cross, the military prosecutor's office, and the Ministry of Defense. There’s silence for now,” says Dmitry.
He says his uncle was diagnosed with mental retardation. Because of this, at one time he was not called up for military service. However, his military ID included category “B” – fit in wartime.
- In any case, they should have sent me to the medical examination for further examination. But do they need it? They take everyone. He was also a drunkard. I have no idea how he was recruited into the war, given the backwardness - who gave him the contract. I feel sorry for my grandmother most of all. Her daughter is gone, my mother is gone, and now her son is gone. On Monday I will fill out a wanted card at the military registration and enlistment office. I hope they will provide at least some more information. If any clue appears, I’ll go to the hospital, anywhere. First of all, I thought of going to his military unit. But the military registration and enlistment office said that even if I found her, no one would talk to me. There are a colossal number of missing people; the commander will not have conversations with all the relatives.
He says that the authorities and the military are not helping relatives at all with the search for missing people.
– I see from chats that people have been looking for people even since 2023. They also say that many are declared missing in order to get rid of unnecessary problems, not to pull out bodies, for example. After six months, it looks like they can be declared dead through the courts. But people believe and continue to search. I have friends who are there now, at the front. They say that bodies, that is, skeletons, have been lying in the fields for months.
"No body means missing"
According to human rights activist, director of the organization "Citizen. Army. Right" Sergei Krivenko , during four years of war, the Russian Ministry of Defense has not established work with the relatives of missing soldiers.
– Even the Ministry of Defense hotline is not working well. The commander is responsible for everything: he must take care of the personnel, carry out the combat mission, and the deputy commander for working with personnel is obliged to communicate with relatives. But in the conditions they have now at the front, no one is doing this. They initially had poor communication with families, poor record keeping, and during the war years nothing was improved. If the commander does not tell anyone anything, he does not bear any responsibility for this, says Sergei Krivenko.
According to him, changing warfare technology also plays a role.
– They usually go on missions in small groups, people die under drones, and in order to remove the bodies, you need to send a new group after them, which is also attacked by drones. It is often impossible to remove the body from the battlefield. At the same time, the paperwork has not changed: the registration of the death of a soldier begins with a death certificate, which must be written by the unit’s medical worker. But you can write it only if you have a body. Let’s say that colleagues saw that a soldier had died, but there was no body, no certificate, and the commander wrote: “missing in action.” He doesn’t know for sure - maybe he died, maybe he escaped, maybe he was captured. There was even a case when a tank was knocked out, the only survivor said that all the others were burned out. But there are no bodies, and relatives are still suffering, trying to recognize them as dead.
A similar case occurred with a resident of Buryatia, Dmitry Inikheev, who was mobilized in 2022, whose body his colleagues could not pull out of a burning tank during a hasty retreat in 2023 from the Ugledar area. Although his colleagues saw his death, Dmitry remained missing in action for about a year.
– True, after the death of the cruiser “Moskva” in April 2022, where there were conscripts, the provision in the Civil Code on recognizing people as killed at the front was changed. Previously, it was possible to recognize a person in court only 5 years after the end of the war, but now six months after being assigned the status of a missing person. If the court declares a person dead, relatives can draw up documents for payments, says Sergei Krivenko.
Relatives or commanders must file a lawsuit. Formally, the court has the right to declare a serviceman dead if there has been no news from him for more than 6 months, but in practice, writes “Verstka”, evidence of colleagues who saw his death is still required. Without official recognition of the death of a serviceman, neither his relatives can receive compensation for him, nor the military unit can exclude him from its composition.
– If the bodies are not identified, there will be a long identification procedure, the relatives will submit DNA, and the results will be entered into the database. If a person is in captivity, this becomes known only after a few months, when the Ukrainian side transfers information about the prisoners to the Red Cross. But relatives may not be informed - again, because there is no such service. And it happens that a person has run away and is hiding, such people contacted us - until they are found, they are also listed as missing. They can also declare SOCH (those who left the unit without permission) - if someone saw the escape. That is, there are also objective reasons why the Ministry of Defense does not know anything about the fate of a serviceman for a long time.
The military themselves, says Krivenko, often complain that commanders unreasonably declare their SOCH - as soon as people leave for a mission, they will be wounded, die or end up in the hospital.
– This is the easiest thing for a commander. This simply removes responsibility from him. If people went on a mission and did not return, he must look for them, evacuate the wounded, and organize the removal of bodies. And then he went to the SOC and that’s it, he transfers the data to the military police and is no longer responsible for the person.
The human rights activist does not rule out that the status of a missing person may be beneficial to commanders for selfish reasons.
“Many people say that before leaving for a mission, military personnel are forced to give their commanders their bank cards with their PIN codes. Now 90% of relationships in the army are tied to money. And violence is linked to money. They buy the opportunity not to go to the assault, dismissal, vacation. The gray area is generally very large. For example, we don’t know how many mobilized people are still fighting. It is known that about 40 thousand were returned, apparently due to injury, some died, most of the remaining were forced to sign a contract. Relatives are ordered to seek all information through military registration and enlistment offices, which do not have access to much information. Data on prisoners, dead, and missing are collected somewhere in the General Staff and transferred to military registration and enlistment offices only upon request, but there is no common database. Therefore, relatives besiege the military registration and enlistment offices, and the military registration and enlistment office can only send a request and wait for a response.
“Our Vladimir Vladimirovich doesn’t know a lot of things”
Ekaterina (name changed for security reasons) has been looking for her husband Alexander for a year and a half, since August 2024. The family lives in the territories occupied by Russia, in the city of Yenakievo (the so-called “DPR”). In recent years, Alexander worked as a loader, but he had the army and two years of contract service behind him, so in 2022, when he was already 47 years old, he was mobilized.
“I went for another order, and the commandant’s office picked him up on the street.” They put me in a car, brought me to the military registration and enlistment office, handed me a summons, two hours to get ready - and that’s it. He came, packed his things, stayed with us - we have two small children, our son was 9 at the time, and our daughter was 5. He said goodbye and left,” recalls Ekaterina.
In January 2023, Alexander received his first serious injury in Novobakhmutovka.
“His hands were badly crushed, right down to the bones, with open wounds. 14 fragments remained in the palms, the phalanx of the ring finger was torn off on the right hand. The left hand does not work, it has begun to dry out, the index finger is crushed, a displaced fracture, broken nerve endings, tendons, there is no sensitivity in the fingers. He went to Donetsk for a consultation with a neurosurgeon; the doctor gave a referral for urgent surgery in Russia to restore the mobility of his left arm.
But, according to Ekaterina, Alexander was not sent to the operation from the unit in Donetsk and was not even allowed to undergo a military medical examination.
“They told him: “Why? Don’t.” He suffered from terrible pain for a whole year. But the military says - no, that’s all, no one will let you go anywhere. He says - I won’t run away anywhere, just perform an operation on me so that my arm can work, how can I walk with one arm? Nobody listened to him, they just gave him sick leave.
Catherine hoped that Alexander’s service was over due to his injury, but in October 2023 he was taken again, this time to Toretsk. Ekaterina was indignant and began writing to the Ministry of Defense, the prosecutor's office and other authorities. It was only thanks to her persistent appeals that the prosecutor's office carried out an investigation.
“And he was returned from a mission in which everyone died except him, and he was sent for a medical examination, but there the wound was considered minor. This was in December 2023, he spent the New Year holidays with his family, and in January he returned to the front line again.
On July 12, he received a second wound.
“He was wounded in the left side and in the leg, they sat on the battlefield for three days, his leg had already begun to rot, the shrapnel barely reached his spine, otherwise, the doctor said, it could have paralyzed him. The fragment was never removed. And there was a very deep wound on the right leg. He spent two weeks in the hospital; in the epicrisis they wrote that the wounds were healing, but they were still open and hurt.
He was temporarily assigned to train new recruits.
“He told me that old grandfathers really came there.” They themselves went to war - they say we will earn money, our pension is not enough. They were deaf, could barely walk, some were well over 60. Alexander was made squad commander and taken to the training ground. For three weeks he trained and taught them. The wounds are open, they hurt, but he was running around with backpacks, didn’t get enough sleep, was malnourished, became incredibly thin, exhausted, and weak. And his vision dropped to almost zero, and he had a stomach ulcer, and his heart began to hurt, and he lost his teeth in this damned war, his health was completely undermined.
Before being sent on his last combat mission, Alexander asked to go home for one night - “to get ready and say goodbye.” On August 27, 2024, he and his colleagues were sent on a combat mission.
“He left all the documents, passport, military ID at home, he only had a badge with a personal number on his neck, an icon and a phone number. Before leaving for the mission, he called: “That’s it, we’re heading out. Kiss the kids.” I say: "God take care of you." I burst into tears, he said: “Calm down, everything is fine there.” And that’s it, we didn’t see or hear him anymore.
Since then, Ekaterina has written many times to the Ministry of Defense, the head of the Investigative Committee Bastrykin, the prosecutor’s office, and the President of the Russian Federation. “Only they redirect to each other, but the cart is still there,” the woman sighs. She also wrote to pro-war bloggers, who, according to her, were rude to her and then blocked her. She and the children did a DNA test, filled out a wanted card, described all the tattoos and other signs of her husband. And then she was scammed twice by scammers.
“I was in such stress - alone, two children, no one to help or advise. In December 2024, just before the New Year, a girl wrote to me on VKontakte that her husband had seen Alexander somewhere near Rostov, in a field hospital. There, he says, they hide the guys from their own commanders, who throw them all into meat. And she gave a Telegram contact to some Alexei Nikolaevich. He gained my trust, told me the number of Sasha’s badge, I checked it and it matched. He said that he should be brought to him in Berdyansk through two checkpoints, and then he would connect me with him via video link, and he would be brought home. And that at every checkpoint you have to pay money to let them through. I gave away 370 thousand in parts. I hoped and believed that he would be returned.
The second time Ekaterina encountered scammers was on March 8, 2025 - a woman called her and said that someone had seen Alexander and other military men taken prisoner.
“I have an acquaintance at the Ministry of Defense,” he says, “I have to pay, and it will be exchanged.” I gave 50 thousand, they sent me documents by e-mail, with signatures - that he was included in the lists, then exchanged, then - that they were taken to Moscow, but came under fire, landed in Belgorod, and ended up in the hospital. I’ve already started to notice that something is wrong. Then they tell me, like, they’ll bring it to Rostov. I got ready, left the children with my aunt and rushed. I arrived and he wasn’t there. Of course I was upset. I also went to Novocherkassk, there was also a hospital department there - nothing anywhere.
Catherine sent a paper letter, photographs of her husband and copies of documents confirming that she was his wife to the Main Military Medical Directorate - so that he would be sent to all hospitals. The answer came only at the end of January 2026: it was not in hospitals. She is sure that Alexander is alive, because one of his colleagues told her that on the last mission their commander “sold them into captivity to save his own skin.” She believes it.
– They sell their own boys into captivity, there are many such cases. They come to an agreement somehow. And this one did the same. I tried to call him, he blocked me on telegram, he doesn’t answer calls,” says Ekaterina.
At the same time, she seems to firmly believe that Commander-in-Chief Putin is simply not aware of what is happening in his army.
– Our Vladimir Vladimirovich doesn’t know a lot of things, he doesn’t understand a lot of what really is. If he knew the whole truth, I think he would have already given all these units and all these generals a good beating.
The military unit wanted to recognize Alexander as missing, and Catherine was sent a summons to appear in court. She went and said: “I dispute it, I don’t agree, I know that he is alive, I will pursue it, prove it.” The court took her side and left the application of the military unit without consideration.
“I am supported by wives and mothers who are waiting for husbands and sons, and by those who are looking for brothers and fathers. In our unit 52 892 132 such chaos is happening! There they nullify their own people, there they take everyone on crutches, without arms, without legs, one-eyed, untreated. And everyone is silent, they don’t want to tell the truth. But I have nothing to hide, I’m already tired of this inaction. What should I be afraid of? Will the children be taken away or what? I'm not afraid of anything anymore.
According to Mediazona, over the past three years, the courts have received 111,569 claims to declare military personnel dead or missing. Apparently, the courts are overwhelmed with claims to declare people dead or missing and they do not have time to consider them. If in 2022 the courts considered 77% of received claims, then by the end of 2024 their share dropped to 64%. In the six months of 2025, the figure fell even further to 59.9%. The courts do not satisfy all claims for recognition as dead or missing. The share of satisfied claims decreased from 80.3% in 2021 to 58.6% in 2024 (in the first half of 2025, their share remained at the same level). At the end of December 2025, cards for such cases began to disappear from the websites of regional courts; by the end of the year, more than 70 thousand cards had disappeared. In 2026, the process continued, now almost all of this data is hidden.
“Skeletons have been lying in the fields for months.” Missing in action during the war against Ukraine