Over 15,000 have gone missing in Ukraine since the start of the war, Matthew Holliday, programme director for Europe for the International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) said, quoted by Reuters.
“The 15,000 figure is conservative when considering that in the port city of Mariupol alone authorities estimate as many as 25,000 people are either dead or missing,” Reuters reports.
Holliday added that it was not clear how many people had been “forcibly transferred, were being held in detention in Russia, were alive and separated from their family members, or had died and had been buried in makeshift graves”. According to him, investigations into missing persons will continue for years to come, even after the war has ended.
“The numbers are huge and the challenges that Ukraine faces are vast. Besides which they’re fighting an ongoing war as well against the Russian Federation.
“The vast majority of missing persons, those deceased, are victims of war crimes, and the perpetrators need to be held responsible,” the programme director emphasised.
ICMP is an organisation located in the Hague created after the Balkan Wars in the 1990s. In July, the organisation opened an office in Kyiv, in order to help Ukraine with finding missing persons and documenting cases.
Yesterday, 24 November, Prosecutor General of Ukraine Andriy Kostin said that 432 bodies of murdered civilians had been found on the liberated from Russian troops territories of the Kherson region. According to him, the mine threat on the liberated territories remains at high level.
“According to the Prosecutor General Office, the presence of nine torture chambers on the liberated territory of the Kherson region has been confirmed. Also, 432 bodies of murdered civilians have been found,” he said.
