Russian Families Looking for Missing Soldiers Ask Ukraine for Help, Says Search Agency

Tens of thousands of Russians whose relatives went missing while fighting in Ukraine have sought help from a Ukrainian agency tasked with identifying war dead, its chief has said.

Ukraine’s “I Want to Find” project has received more than 50,000 requests from families of Russian servicemen to help confirm whether their loved ones were killed in action, according to Bohdan Okhrimenko.

“And these are only the ones who are not afraid to reach out to us,” Okhrimenko, the head of the Secretariat of the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, was cited as saying by the Ukrainian defense ministry’s ArmyInform news website.

Aside from the “I Want to Find” project, which aims to identify bodies of Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine, the Coordination Headquarters also operates the “I Want to Live” project, which encourages Russian troops to surrender and provides them with guidelines on how to do so.

Meanwhile, Russian deputy defense minister Anna Tsivileva said during a session of her country’s parliament in early December that 48,000 people have submitted DNA samples to the Russian authorities in the hope of identifying relatives missing in action. The recording of the session was subsequently removed from the parliament’s official website.

Okhrimenko said: “According to our calculations, the Russians have a total of over 100,000 missing persons, and this is not counting those we already know are dead. A great many missing Russians are scattered across our fields, their remains carried away by dogs. Their identification is of no interest to the Russian Federation.”

Other Topics of Interest

Moscow’s Kerch Oil Spill Kills Endangered Dolphins – Environmentalists

Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier acknowledged the Russian tanker spill as an “ecological disaster.”

Okhrimenko said the reason for this is that when a soldier is confirmed to have been killed in combat, the Russian authorities are supposed to pay out compensation to relatives.

He added: “It is profitable for them to consider the soldiers missing. Commanders continue to receive financial support for their upkeep. The family receives nothing.”