Message from the Russian army: “We have lost your son”

For months, Elvira Kaipova had not heard of his son Rafael, a Russian soldier deployed in Ukraine.

Military officials answered his repeated questions about his fate saying that he was in active service and therefore beyond. Then, at the end of last November, two days after having made this assertion again, she learned that he had disappeared on November 1 – in a telegram channel which helps the families of the military.

“We have lost your son,” said Aleksandr Sokolov, the officer of the Rafael unit in charge of the family affair, told her when she went to his head office in western Russia.

“How did it lose it?” She says that she replied, alarmed and angry, especially when the officer explained that after Rafael had failed to record by radio, a search turned out to be impossible. “How are we looking for it?” She says the officer told her.

The variations in this sinister scenario have been repeated countless times since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The Russian Defense Ministry has no official effort to find the legions of missing soldiers, according to bereaved families, private organizations trying to help them and military analysts. Relatives, stuck in the limbo, reproduce with themselves with rare government information.

The ministry itself refused to comment on this article. Mr. Sokolov, the liaison officer, said in an SMS: “You realize that I can’t comment anything.”

Even if Russia and Ukraine reach a peace agreement, the hunt for missing soldiers should last for years, even decades.

The Ministry of Defense has not published any statistics on the number of missing persons, which, according to military analysts, is because it does not know the number. Estimates take place at tens of thousands.

Anna Tsivovilyova, Vice-Minister of the Defense and Cousin of President Vladimir V. Putin, told the state Duma last November that 48,000 parents of the disappeared had submitted DNA samples in the hope of identifying the remains, although this included duplicate requests from the same family.

In Ukraine, “Want To Find”, a government project to help locate the Russian soldiers captured or killed there, said that he had received more than 88,000 information requests, with more than 9,000 in April. He noted that the overall number of missing is still unknown.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which tries to locate the disappearance on both sides, whether civilians or soldiers, has 110,000 cases.

The family of Isakhanov Ravazan, a 25 -year -old soldier, received a brief voice message for the last time on November 9. During a battle shortly after, he said his aunt, he had his commander’s radio that he could not go up the bleeding of a bad injury. It has not been heard since.

“No one saw him dead,” said his aunt, who, like several people in this article, did not want to be appointed in fear of falling into force of the laws against the detail of the loss of battlefield. “Maybe he saved himself, maybe someone has found him, we always keep hope that he is alive,” she said. “There is no peace for the soul. I can’t sleep at night, and her parents either. ”

Most of the missing soldiers are probably dead and were abandoned on the battlefield, experts said. There are not enough teams to collect bodies, and the constant deployment of drones makes recovery too dangerous.

Commanders have enough trouble providing food and ammunition, and it is priority, said a military analyst of the conflict intelligence team, an independent exile organization that follows the conflict. The analyst, who refused to use his name to avoid compromising relatives still in Russia, said that only the families of soldiers care if the bodies are collected, “and there is no punishment for alienating parents.”

A Ukrainian man from the occupied city of Luhansk, who was trained in service as a battlefield doctor and who also refused to be identified, said about his experience: “Hundreds of people have been left there. Each day, dozens were injured or killed.”

Even when the bodies are recovered, the identification is problematic. Often, the remains can only be removed after the battle lines move clearly so that attack drones fly elsewhere, and this could take months or even years.

THE military In the western city of Rostov, officially known as the center for the reception, treatment and sending of the deceased, is the main compensation center.

When she learned that her son was missing, Ms. Kaipova, who is married and has another son, flew there first. “Everything is overcrowded,” she said, arriving at 7 am to submit a DNA sample and leaving at 10 pm “wives, mothers, fathers-all crying, sobbing, waiting”.

The investigators told him, as well as, they faced an backlog of around 15,000 unidentified soldiers. The slow pace, the constant references to different government agencies and the lack of basic information have families of slow boiling. Anger overflows with many online discussion rooms where relatives are asking for help.

In a comment on the Vkontakte social network, a participant named Polina Medvedeva rocket Military commanders as “irresponsible”. Some comrades of her husband told her that he had died heroically, she wrote, but the army did not confirm his death and that there is no body.

“Where are the details?” She wrote. “Why does command ignore us, avoiding answers, throwing us from one number to another?” My heart breaks with pain and anger for what they have done to our family. ”

Some families are even more public.

Parents of soldiers who have disappeared from the 25th motorized rifle brigade of the Leningrad region guards have launched repeated calls to Mr. Putin.

“Wherever we meet indifference!” they said In a video last month showing photos of the missing. Each family receives exactly the same letter of form and is just told, on several occasions, to wait, they said: “Help us! We are tired of living in ignorance for months and years! ”

The Kremlin established the defenders of the Fatation State Foundation, ostensibly to help soldiers, veterans and their families. But he has no interior track on the missing details, analysts said.

There is “no liaison system with the families of soldiers,” said Sergei Krivenko, director of a human rights organization formed to help soldiers. He described the Fatherland Foundation as “false structure”, designed to divert the blame of the Ministry of Defense and “give a semblance of action”.

The Fatherland Foundation did not respond to requests for comments.

Ms. Kaipova has written to many civil servants starting with Mr. Putin, visited her administrative office and searched in several hospitals, some of which are in the middle of the fights in eastern Ukraine. “I run in circles,” she said.

Her quest took a rare turn when she thought she recognized Rafael with a serious head injury in a short video clip filmed aboard an evacuation helicopter. She is convinced that he is lying in a hospital somewhere afflicted in amnesia.

The administrator of a discussion group where she posted the video said that at least 20 other people identified the same man as their disappeared soldier.

“Everyone is so desperate that they see their loved ones opposite,” said Kapova, but rejected any suggestion that this could also be the case for her. The unity of his son said that his doctors had no trace of the evacuation.

Rafael was a reluctant soldier. Raised in the central city of Tyumen, he seriously injured another man who tried to take his car. The officials presented him with a common choice in Russian criminal affairs: go to prison or to the front. His mother begged him to choose the prison, but he fell back. “He was in agony, rhythm,” she said. “He didn’t want war or prison.”

He deployed on August 1, his 20th anniversary. She has never heard of him again. A soldier hospitalized in his unit called once to tell him that Rafael had shouted for his mother in fear at the start of his first battle.

She learned from form 1421, the laconic military file of his disappearance, which he served with an intelligence unit. Rafael was part of a group of soldiers doing “special tasks” in a village in the province of Donetsk, he said, when they were criticized for artillery and drones. “The group, which included Rafael Kaipov, lost contact after this commitment.”

Under new laws, commanders can go to court only after the last contact with a soldier to make him disappear, allowing them to stop his combat salary.

The families themselves must submit an additional file so that the disappeared soldier is declared dead, who publishes heavy advantages. Some avoid such a definitive step.

“I constantly cry, morning and evening,” said Kaipova. “My biggest fear is that I will exhaust each lead and that I do not remain to turn to you.”

Oleg of Matsnev Contributed reports.