Lost sons

“At the time, volunteers told us that my son was in hospital in occupied Donetsk with a leg injury,” Suhak continues. “Then they kept him in the occupied Luhansk region. I haven’t heard anything since 2017. But my son is alive.”

Suhak’s face is almost as pale as her white sweater, which bears the symbol of Berehynia, a Ukrainian organisation made up of mothers and relatives of those who fought in the Anti-Terrorist Operation, as the war in Donbas was referred to before the full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Suhak is one of Berehynia’s founders. Lawyers advise her to avoid speaking about her son or allowing his photos to be published since prisoners in Russian captivity often invent stories to help them escape the most severe forms of torture. Publishing identifying information can therefore put them at risk.

Though Ukraine’s Security Service used to be responsible for prisoners of war and missing persons, it has never transferred the relevant data about those taken prisoner from before the full-scale invasion to the organisation now in charge, Suhak says. This means that families are required to re-submit information about their loved ones. “We were forced to go through hell once again to confirm the status of our children, giving photo and video evidence,” Suhak explains. 

“Hell,” Suhak continues, “is when mothers are told, whether it is true or not, that their son is dead if he has not been heard of in six months. As if it were easy to write home or call Ukraine from Russian captivity! There are even more complaints about military representatives attempting to prove that those missing in action since 2014 should be considered dead, not killed. Being classified as ‘dead’ takes them off the unit’s list and strips them of their right to any financial compensation.”

“Now there’s more attention on those captured since the start of the big war,” Suhak says, referring to the full-scale invasion.

“Our loved ones were the first to bear the brunt of the war,” Berehynia head Alla Makukh agrees. Her son was held captive between 2015 and 2016 and was fortunate to return home. He served with the 40th Territorial Defence Battalion Kryvbas in Ilovaisk and Debaltseve, both occupied towns in the Donetsk region.

But Ukraine’s international partners tend to see 24 February 2022 as the start of the full-scale war when it comes to compensation, appearing to disregard the War in Donbas that started in 2014, Makukh says. “Didn’t my son and his friends also suffer from Russia’s actions?”

Ukraine’s Interior Ministry defines a person as missing in action if they haven’t returned from combat, aren’t confirmed in captivity, or their body has never been returned to their family. This is the case even if friends are confident they saw them being captured. Only organisations such as the Red Cross, which act as intermediaries between Ukraine’s National Information Bureau and its Russian counterpart, can confirm a missing person’s status.

Several organisations handle matters relating to those missing in action, from the National Police to the Armed Forces to specialist ombudsmen, all of which serve different functions. The number of organisations involved often makes it difficult for families to know who they should contact.

Cut out of family photos

At a conference in Kyiv on 10 December, women hang up posters of the disappeared. Many of the images feature either very young or very old men, their faces cut out of family photos. The women hanging up the images are wearing sweaters bearing the names of units from which soldiers had gone missing. 

The conference was organised by the International Commission on Missing Persons and the Media Initiative for Human Rights (MIHR), which has spent nearly 10 years documenting Russia’s war crimes in Ukraine, including forced disappearances and deportation of children, and keeps a record of war crimes prosecutions.

In May 2023 Ukraine’s Interior Ministry announced that it had made a register of all those who had gone missing “under special circumstances” — that is, as a result of the ongoing war. There were initially around 23,000 people on the list. 

One of the conference’s main speakers, Ihor Kalantay, the head of the Ukrainian National Police’s Main Investigative Department, updates the figure: “There are now 59,674 people on the register.” While the majority of those missing are soldiers, Ukrainian media has also reported on 2,021 children and 1,877 civilians who have disappeared.

According to Kalantay, DNA samples from relatives must be sent to the Interior Ministry’s expert forensic centre if proper identification of those missing is to be carried out. However, this is complicated by the fact that many Ukrainians are now scattered around the world as refugees.

Kalantay adds that Ukraine has been able to obtain 751 DNA samples from relatives of missing persons who have ended up in Europe, establishing matches in 107 cases. But at this rate, the process could drag on for years.

‘They record the living, but return the dead’

“When a prisoner exchange happens, you see the end result — not what went into it. It takes a very powerful machine to get Ukrainians out of Russian captivity,” says Oleh Hushchin, the spokesperson for the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, calling the negotiations with Russia “morally and psychologically terrifying”.

There have been 58 prisoner exchanges since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine that have returned 3,767 people — 3,599 soldiers and 168 civilians. Around 40% were classified as missing in action. 

Repatriation of fallen soldiers is also facilitated by the Red Cross, which has helped bring back about 4,500 bodies, Hushchin says. However, some prisoners of war simply don’t make it home alive, he continues, with 88 prisoners documented as alive in Russian detention, but only their bodies making it back to Ukraine. “Yes, you heard that right. They record the living, but return the dead.”

“I’ll show you where they keep Ukrainian prisoners in Russia,” Huschin says, turning to an interactive map to explain to the conference attendees. “Russia hasn’t opened any special camps for prisoners of war, as required by the Geneva Convention. Our soldiers are sent to penal colonies, detention centres and prisons. We’ve identified 186 locations in Russia and the temporarily occupied Ukrainian regions, and another 29 locations where they torture civilian prisoners.”

‘Don’t the dead have rights?’

“I was looking for my son, a volunteer who defended the capital from the Russian occupiers, for two and a half years. I did everything I was supposed to do. And do you know where I found him? Here, at a morgue in central Kyiv,” says one woman at the conference. “All this time my son was practically right beside the house he grew up in. Tell me, don’t the dead have rights? Who protects them?”

Vitaliy Povstyaniy, head of the Health Ministry’s Forensics Department in Kyiv, keeps quiet. Earlier, at the start of his talk, he said that the sheer volume of DNA requiring analysis since the start of the war in February 2022 was beyond the means of any country. 

Logistical problems don’t carry much weight for those present, however. “After the liberation of Kherson in November 2022, bodies were identified and repatriated. But they’ve only just finished the DNA testing,” says one conference attendee. “How can you not go insane knowing that a loved one was killed but still hasn’t been buried?”

No one has told the relatives why funerals have to be postponed indefinitely. Valentyna Akulenko, head of Ukraine’s Interior Ministry’s Department for Missing Persons, attempts to explain: “When they say, ‘They returned 500 bodies’ — that’s standardised wording. In reality, these are just remains, fragments. And they must all be examined, without exception.”

While the testing is ongoing, it’s impossible to tell whether certain remains belong to a specific person, Akulenko explains. “Because, unfortunately, there have been cases when families were given the wrong body. Now we only return bodies when we’re 100% sure.”

All the country’s morgues are involved in identifying repatriated bodies to lighten the load on border regions, which is why remains from the Donetsk region can end up as far away as Lviv in western Ukraine, Akulenko explains.

“We can’t refuse new repatriations under the pretext that there’s nowhere to preserve the remains or no one to conduct the examination. We have an obligation to take back all our fallen defenders, no matter how many are handed over to us,” she stresses.

The photos on the wall show many young, smiling faces, frozen in time. The faces waiting for them to return, however, are a full war older.