More than 180,000 people have gone missing in the war in Ukraine
Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has received 182,000 requests to search for missing persons from both sides.
This is reported by The Moscow Times.
According to the report, Russians and Ukrainians are searching for their relatives, not only military personnel but also civilians, including children. The source did not specify the exact number of requests from each side, but emphasized that the overall figure does not reflect the full picture and that in reality there are even more such families.
The ICRC receives information about prisoners of war from official lists that Russia and Ukraine exchange with each other. In addition, representatives of the organization can visit places of detention of captured combatants and collect messages there for relatives — either oral or written.
In this way, it is possible to establish that the person being sought is alive. According to the publication’s source, over nearly four years of war the ICRC has delivered more than 24.2 thousand messages from prisoners of war.
However, despite these efforts, many families have for years not known what happened to their loved ones, an organization representative noted. According to him, the experience of past wars shows that the search for missing persons can last for decades even after hostilities have ended.
