In the stark images of frozen gray faces, blood-stained trunks and remains, they search for a flicker of something recognizable: a scar or a ring. “Twenty hours a day I go through these Telegram channels looking for him,” said Maria, her face gripped with grief. “We are a community of women looking for our loved ones. We all have to scroll through the pictures of the dead. We have to see if it’s there.” A manicurist by trade, she was looking for her fiance, a 32-year-old construction worker and engineer from Dnipro named Roman. He disappeared in July a little more than a month after receiving his invitation papers and just a week into his first assignment: a reconnaissance mission into one of the unsavory lines of Donbas, in eastern Ukraine. At the time of speaking to The Independent, Maria explained that he and a large part of the artillery brigade were still missing. They were last heard from on July 3. Family members do not know if they are alive, captured or dead somewhere on an inaccessible battlefield. Adding to the woes is that the Ukrainians accuse the Russians of not properly releasing the names and whereabouts of their prisoners of war. According to the Geneva Conventions, the International Committee of the Red Cross must have lists of prisoners and be allowed to visit them wherever they are. However, the ICRC has repeatedly warned that they have not been given full access to prisons and detention camps since Putin launched his war in February. Lyudmila Denisova, Ukraine’s former human rights ombudsman, claims Moscow has also refused Ukraine’s requests to confirm the whereabouts of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers. “For example, Ukraine asked Russia for about 5,000 soldiers who were in Mariupol. Russia has only confirmed that 3,000 are alive, but has not said where they are,” he said. A damaged Russian armored personnel carrier on the outskirts of Izyum in September (AFP via Getty Images) The Independent was unable to verify this. Russia denies it is deliberately obscuring the fate of Ukrainian prisoners. Therefore, in the age of social media, the internet has become a lifeline in this war. Relatives of Roman’s brigade, which The Independent has decided not to identify for security reasons, have set up a Telegram channel seeking information. Within a week it had more than 700 subscribers. The devastating truth is that some bodies may never be found, their loved ones never found Dr. Vladislav Perovskyi Every day, mothers, sisters, fathers, partners, brothers scour the internet trying to find any scraps of information shared in conversation. One of the most valuable resources is the gruesome “trophy” shots posted by Russian soldiers and their proxies. “It’s horrible. I want to know that he is alive and that he is captured by Russia,” Maria said, crying as she scrolled through Telegram channels. “I only sleep an hour a night. I scroll and scroll and scroll looking for him. I need help to find out what happened.” A Ukrainian soldier sits inside a truck in Kupiansk that was recently recaptured earlier this month (Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.) This is the fate of family members of both soldiers and civilians who have disappeared. In an information blackout, it’s up to them to gather open source information to try to piece together what happened. Russia has strongly denied violating international law in Ukraine and accused Kyiv of deliberately staging atrocities to gain international support.
Where is?
Over the past few months The Independent has investigated the disappearance of Ukrainian civilians and soldiers from across the country, uncovering new evidence of possible war crimes including forced transportation, enforced disappearance, hostage-taking, torture and forced labour. He disputed Moscow’s narrative that this movement of people was voluntary and part of humanitarian evacuation efforts. We followed the lives of more than a dozen people, including Roman, along the way, managing to locate two people and inform their families of their whereabouts, and revealing the three main routes used by Moscow’s forces to transport Ukrainian civilians and military personnel to prisons in Russia. Throughout the journey, one constant has been the creative ways families and members of civil society are using to try to find people. Ukrainian officials say they have received at least 25,000 official missing person requests to a national hotline since the start of the war. Only half of them have been recorded. Among them are believed to be at least 228 missing children, according to the press service of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office. Vladislav Perovskyi, 27, a medical examiner, has identified 250 bodies since the start of the war, but warns that some may never be found (Bel Tru) About 7,000 members of the Ukrainian armed forces are among the missing, according to Yury Berlusov, a Ukrainian prosecutor looking into the cases. It is feared, however, that this estimate is extremely conservative and that the actual number of both civilians and military missing could be up to 10 times higher. “If a person is missing but no one calls the police hotline, then the person is not in the database and will not be counted,” he continued. “We don’t know where the missing people are. They could be alive but refugees. they could have been deported to Russia, killed or held in detention centers.” For Maria and the other women she is in contact with, the Facebook, Telegram and WhatsApp groups are key places to seek information about prisoner exchanges and the discovery and recovery of bodies, as well as to contact those who have come out of the forehead, the front line in combat. line or have been released. He says they are also talking to military officials and soldiers they know. They share contacts and pool their information and resources. “It’s hell – I have to take a lot of medication to be calm enough to handle this stuff, day in and day out,” Maria added shakily. “I can’t do my real job. Finding Roman is my full-time job now.” Oleh Lutsai, 70, stands in front of the entrance to the damaged building where he lives in the liberated village of Hrakove (Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.) Civilians are working with charities and others to continue the search, according to Ivanka Malchevska of the Center for Civil Liberties in Kyiv, which is investigating 490 active cases of missing civilians and soldiers. The youngest missing person known to the center is only 16 years old. It collects reports from released prisoners or witnesses in areas of occupied territory and uses social media to try to piece together what happened. In a secure Google Form, it offers relatives a place to submit and save any information they have. In this way he has already successfully located hundreds of people. Ms. Malchevska says it’s dangerous work. Some of the people in the occupied territories who gave them information about missing persons disappeared themselves. I can’t breathe without him. Many people just need to know what happened, where they are, at least some closure MARY “And that is why we are concerned that the actual number of missing persons is much higher than we could imagine. Some people may never be found,” he said. Svitlana – whose ex-husband and father of her 12-year-old daughter disappeared in March while trying to rescue family members from besieged Mariupol – is an example of these online communities at work. For her, the Internet was the only lifeline after Oleksiy volunteered to drive to the then-besieged city of Mariupol to rescue relatives and friends. He sent a message to say he was approaching the city and then vanished into thin air. “In desperation we started posting on Facebook about the disappearances and that’s when we started getting scraps of information,” Svitlana said. An online community of relatives of volunteer drivers like Oleksiy, who had begun to disappear one by one, gathered valuable resources. Through this they discovered that her ex-husband was being held in Olenivka prison, a former penal colony in the self-proclaimed Russian-backed Donetsk People’s Republic. The large facility reopened when the war began to hold civilian prisoners and POWs captured in the south of the country. The Independent’s investigation into the facility reveals evidence of enforced disappearances, torture and forced labour, as prisoners such as Svitlana’s ex-husband were kidnapped, beaten and forced to renovate the crumbling facility for the influx of prisoners. A destroyed church in the liberated village of Hrakow (Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.) “A lot of drivers who went to Mariupol were disappearing, so we ended up creating this community and crowdsourcing information.” They even tried to gain access to the prison to send supplies – to no avail.
The most serious fear
In July, Oleksiy was finally released along with 30 other drivers taken in March and April. Many relatives believe this happened because of the families’ advocacy outside the prison. But Oleksiy is one of the lucky few. The worst fear for people like Maria is that their loved ones are dead. And that in itself is another nightmare. When Russian forces finally withdrew from the areas they held in northwestern and northeastern Ukraine—including Kiev, Chernihiv and Kharkiv—regional officials, civil society and families began discovering mass and makeshift graves. The Independent stumbled upon a body in the woods of a young teenager who had clearly been bound and shot. With the discovery of the dead comes the grueling task of identifying them. And this is where…
