A message from the Russian army: “We lost your son”

For several months, Elvira Kaipova did not hear from her son Rafael, a Russian soldier who was deployed in Ukraine.

Military officials answered their repeated questions about his whereabouts by saying that he was in active service and therefore unfamiliar. After that, in late November, two days after confirming again, I learned that he had disappeared on November 1 – from a telegram channel that would help military families.

“We have lost your son,” Alexander Sogolov, an officer in the unity of Raphael responsible for family contact, told her when she traveled to her headquarters in western Russia.

“It lost it how?” She says she replied, she was anxious and angry, especially when the officer explained that after Raphael’s failure to log in radio, the search proved impossible. “How do we search for it?” She says the officer told her.

Differences in this dark scenario were repeated countlessly because Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The Russian Ministry of Defense lacks any official and organized effort to track down the hordes of missing soldiers, according to the confirmation families, private organizations trying to help them and military analysts. Relatives, stuck in forgetting, defend themselves with minimal government information.

The ministry itself refused to comment on this article. “You realize that I cannot comment on anything,” said Mr. Sokolov, the connection officer, in a text message.

Even if Russia and Ukraine reach a peace agreement, it is expected to bear the search for missing soldiers for years, if not contracts.

The Ministry of Defense has not published any statistics on the number of missing persons, which analysts and military families say do not know the number. Estimates work to tens of thousands.

Anna Tsifilio, Deputy Minister of Defense and Cousin of President Vladimir Vin, has always told the state last November that 48,000 relatives of the missing have made DNA samples in the hope of determining the remains, although this included some repeated requests from the same family.

In Ukraine, “you want to find,” said a government project to help determine the location of the Russian soldiers who were seized or killed there, that he had received more than 88,000 requests for information, with more than 9000 in April alone. And note that the total number of missing persons is still unknown.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which is trying to locate its missing location on both sides, whether civil or military, has 110,000 cases that have been submitted.

The Izakhanov family, Rafazan, a 25 -year -old soldier, said the last short voice message on November 9. During a battle shortly after that, his aunt, his leader, said that he could not deceive the bleeding from a bad wound. He has not heard since then.

“No one sees him dead,” his aunt, who, like many people in this article, said his name does not want to be afraid of falling to reduce laws against detailing the battlefield losses. She said, “Maybe he saved himself, perhaps one of them found him, we still stick to the hope to be alive.” “There is no peace for the soul. I cannot sleep at night, and his parents cannot.”

Experts said that most of the soldiers most likely died in the fighting and were abandoned in the battlefield. There is not enough team to collect bodies, and the continuous spread of drones makes the retrieval very dangerous.

A military analyst in the intelligence team, an independent organization in exile that follows the conflict, said that the leaders are facing a sufficient problem in providing food and ammunition, and this is the priority. The analyst, who refused to use his name to avoid exposing the relatives who are still in Russia, said that only the families of the soldiers are the caring of the bodies, “There is no punishment for the alienation of relatives.”

“Hundreds of people were lying down there. Every day, dozens were wounded or killed,” said a Ukrainian man from the occupied city of Luhansk, who was encouraged in service as a medical battlefield and who also refused to identify him.

Even when the bodies are recovered, identification is a problem. Often, the remains can only be removed after the battle lines turn significantly so that the drone flying an attack elsewhere, and this may take months or even years.

the Military morgue In the western city of Rostov, officially known as the reception center, its treatment and transmission, is the main center of Al -Maqasra.

When she learned that her son was missing, Mrs. Kaipova flew, and she has another son, first. She said: “Everything is crowded,” she reached 7 am to present a sample of DNA and left them at 10 pm. “Wives, mothers, fathers – all cry, cry, wait.”

The investigators there and others told her that they are facing an accumulation of about 15,000 unidentified soldiers. Slow pace, continuous referrals to various government agencies, and the absence of basic information that have lost families in slow boiling. Anger overflows with many online chat rooms where relatives ask for help.

In one comment on the VKontakte social network, a participant named Polina Medvedyva Go out Military leaders as “responsible”. Some of her husband’s comrades wrote that he died heroic, and wrote, but the army did not confirm his death and there is no corpse.

“Where are the details?” I wrote. “Why do we ignore the matter, avoid answers, and throw us from one number to another? My heart is broken by pain and anger when they did it to our family.”

Some families go more general.

Relatives of the missing soldiers from the twenty -fifth round guards gun brigade from the Leningrad region made repeated calls to Mr. Putin.

“Everywhere we face indifference!” they He said In a video of last month, it shows pictures of the missing. Each family receives exactly the same message and only tells us, over and over, waiting, “Help us! We are tired of living in ignorance for several months and years!”

Kremlin has established defenders of the National State Foundation, outwardly to help old soldiers and warriors and their families. Analysts said it has no internal path on details about the missing.

Sergey Krifino, director of human rights organization, said to help soldiers. The Al -Watan Foundation described as a “fake structure”, designed to convert the blame from the Ministry of Defense and “to give something similar to work.”

Al -Watan Foundation did not respond to the requests for comment.

Mrs. Kapova wrote to many officials who started Mr. Putin, visited his administrative office and discussed through multiple hospitals, including some fighting in eastern Ukraine. She said, “I run in circles.”

She took an unfamiliar turn when she thought she got to know Raphael with a wound in his head in a short video clip on a evacuation helicopter. She is convinced that he is lying in a hospital somewhere with memory loss.

The director of the chat group, in which the video published, said that at least 20 people identified the same man as their missing soldiers.

“Everyone is so desperate that they see their loved ones in any way,” Mrs. Kapova admitted, but she refused any suggestion that this might be the case for her as well. The unity of her son said that the paramedics had no record of evacuating it.

Raphael was a hesitant soldier. He grew up in the central city of Tayman, and was seriously injured by another man who tried to take his car. Officials gave him a joint option in Russian criminal cases: moved to prison or to the front. His mother begged him to choose the prison, but he wore. “He was in torment and frequency,” she said. “He did not want war or imprisonment.”

The past was published on August 1, his twentieth birthday. You did not hear from him again. A hospital soldier has once called his unit to tell her that Raphael shouted to his mother for fear at the beginning of his first battle.

I learned from the model 1421, the military registry that disappeared, that he served with the intelligence unit. She said that Raphael was among a group of soldiers who were “special tasks” in the village of Donetsk Province, when they were fire from artillery and drones. “The group, which included Raphael Kaibov, lost contact after this participation.”

Under the new laws, the officers of the court can go to court only six months from the last contact with a soldier to announce it missing, allowing them to stop his combat salary.

The families themselves must submit an additional case to announce the missing soldier of his death, which launches huge benefits. Some avoid such a final step.

“I cry constantly, morning and night,” said Ms. Kapova. “My biggest fear is that I will exhaust every progress and no one is left to resort to.”

Matsif Oleg The reports contributed.