Ukraine received a surge in queries last month from Russian families seeking information on missing relatives serving in Moscow’s army, Kyiv said on Tuesday.
Ukraine last year established a hotline for Russians to learn details of missing relatives and friends as part of efforts to streamline prison exchanges.
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The hotline called “I want to find” is run by the Coordination Centre for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which said it had received 8,548 requests last month.
“This number of applications per month is a record,” it said on Telegram, adding that the figure was 22 percent more than December.
The centre said that since the project launched it had received more than 60,000 requests for details of missing Russian troops.
It claimed the real number of missing Russian personnel was likely two or three times higher since “as not all relatives have yet applied to the Ukrainian project.”
It added that 1,790 Russian soldiers were or remain in Ukrainian captivity and that 408 have already been exchanged.
The overall number of Russian prisoners of war in Ukraine is higher, it added.
The coordination centre said the increase in queries from Russia “indicates the enemy’s huge losses in Ukraine.”
The exchange of prisoners of war and the remains of dead troops remains one of the few areas of cooperation between Kyiv and Moscow after nearly three years of costly fighting.
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