Message From the Russian Military: ‘We Lost Your Son’

For months, Elvira Kaipova had no news of her son Rafael, a Russian soldier deployed in Ukraine.

Military officers answered their repeated questions about their with everyone saying that he was active and, therefore, incommunicado. Then, at the end of last November, two days after they made that statement again, he learned that he had disappeared on November 1, from a telegram channel that helps military families.

“We resolve his son,” said Aleksandr Sokolov, Rafael’s unit officer in charge of the family link, traveled to his headquarters in western Russia.

“Did he lose it as?” She says she responded, alarmed and angry, especially when the officer explained that after Rafael had not been able to register on radio, a search had been impossible. “How do we look for it?” She says the officer told her.

Variations on this gloomy scenario have been repeated innumerable times since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The Russian Defense Ministry lacks any formal and organized effort to locate legions of missing, private and thematic soldiers and bichas analysts. Family members, trapped in limbo, defend themselves with the information of the scan government.

The ministry refused to comment for this article. Mr. Sokolov, the link officer, said in a text message: “You realize that I can’t comment on anything.”

Even if Russia and Ukraine reach a peace agreement, it is expected that the search for missing soldiers last for years, if not decades.

The Ministry of Defense has not published any statistics on the number of missing, that military analysts and families say that the number does not know. Estimates run to tens of thousands.

Anna TSIVILYOVA, Vice President of Defense and Prima of President Vladimir V. Putin, told the Duma of the State last November that 48,000 relatives of the disappeared had presented DNA samples in the hope of identifying remains, everything included.

In Ukraine, “I want to find”, a government project to help locate the Russian military captured or killed there, said he had received more than 88,000 information requests, with approximately 9,000 alone in April. He pointed out that the total missing number is still unknown.

The International Red Cross Committee, which tries to locate the lack of both sides, whether civil or military, has 110,000 cases presented.

Isakhanov Ravanan’s family, a 25 -year -old soldier, received a voice message from him on November 9. Duration a battle son later, said his aunt, radiograph his commander that he could not avoid bleeding a bad wound. He has not had leg news since then.

“No one saw him dead,” said his aunt, who, like several people in this article, did not want to be appointed for fear of conflict or laws against the detail of the losses of the battlefield. “Maybe he saved himself, maybe someone found him, we are still waiting for the hope that he is alive,” he said. “There is no peace for the soul. I can’t sleep at night, and Neinder can his parents.”

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

The commanders have enough problems to deliver food and ammunition, and that is the priority, said a military analyst with the conflict intelligence team, an independent organization in exile that tracks the conflict. The analyst, who refused to use the name to avoid jeopardizing relatives in Russia, said only the families of the soldiers care if the bodies are collected, “and there is no punishment for alienating relations.”

A Ukrainian man from the occupied city of Luhansk, who was drugged in service as a battlefield doctor and also declined to be identified, said about his experience: “The sinks of people were throwing there.

Even when the bodies recover, identification is problematic. The remains can be removed only after the battle lines change significantly so that attack drones fly elsewhere, and that could take months or even years.

Military Morue in the western city of Rostov, an officer known as the reception center, processing and willing of the deceased, is the main compensation center.

When he knew that his son was missing, Mrs. Kaipova, who is married and has another son, flew first there. “Everything is overcrowded,” he said, reaching 7 am to present a DNA sample and leave at 10 pm “wives, mothers, fathers, all crying, sobbing, waiting.”

The researchers there told her and others who face a request for orders of around 15,000 unidentified services. The slow rhythm, the constant references to different government agencies and the lack of basic information have the families of the disappeared in boiling. The anger overflows with numerous online chat rooms where family members seek help.

In a comment on the Vkontakte social network, a participant named Polina Medvedeva criticized military commanders as “irresponsible.” Some of the husband’s comrades said he had heroically, he wrote, but the military has not confirmed his death and that there is no body.

“Where are the details?” She wrote. “Why does he ignore the command, avoiding the 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.

The relatives of the missing soldiers of the 25th Guard Motorized the rifle brigade of the Leningrad region have made repeated appeals to Mr. Putin.

“We find indifference everywhere!” They said in a video the latest photos of the missing. Each family receives exactly the same form of form and is told, repeatedly, to wait, they told me: “Help us! We are tired of living in ignorance for months and years!”

The Kremlin established the defenders of the State Foundation of Patrices, Ostesiber, to help soldiers, veterans and their families. But it does not have an internal track about the details about the disappeared, analysts said.

“There is no link system with the” families of the soldiers, “said Sergei Krivenko, director of a human rights organization formed to help soldiers. He called the Paterna Foundation a” false structure “, designed to divert the guilt of the Ministry of Defense and” to give an appearance of action. “

The Paterna Foundation did not respond to comments requests.

Mrs. Kaipova has written to numerous officials who begin with Mr. Putin, visited her administrative office and searched in multiple hospitals, including some amid the fight in eastern Ukraine. “I run in circles,” he said.

His search gave an uncomprided twist when he thought he acknowledged Rafael with a serious head wound in a brief video clip filmed aboard an evacuation helicopter. She is convinced that she is lying in a hospital somewhere affected by amnesia.

The administrator of a chat group where she published the video said that at least 20 other people identified the same man as her missing soldier.

“Everyone is so desperate that they see their loved ones in any face,” Kaipova admitted, but dismissed any suggestion that this could also be the case for her. His son’s unity said his doctors have no record to evacuate him.

Rafael was a reluctant soldier. Raised in the central city of Tyumen, Hey seriously injured another man who tried to take his car. The authorities presented a common choice in Russian criminal cases: go to jail or in front. His mother begged him to choose jail, but he backed away. “I was in agony, walking,” he said. “Hey, I didn’t want war or prison.”

His twenty -birthday was deployed on August 1. She never heard from him again. A hospitalized soldier from his unit called him to tell him that Rafael had shouted for his mother with fear of his first battle.

He learned from form 1421, the military record of his disappearance, which served with an intelligence unit. Rafael was among a group of soldiers who carried out “special tasks” in a village in Donetsk province, he said, when they are criticized by artillery and drones. “The group, which included Rafael Kaipov, lost contact after this commitment.”

According to new laws, officers in command can go to court only six months after the last contact with a soldier to declare him missing, allowing them to stop their combat payment.

The families themselves have to present an additional case for the missing soldier to declare dead, to release melifits. Some avoid such a definitive scooter.

“I cry constantly, tomorrow and night,” Kaipova said. “My greatest fear is that each lead exhausts and I don’t stay to anyone to turn to.”

Oleg Matsnev Contributed reports.