Russia Has Lost More Than 50,000 Soldiers Missing

6 January, 2025 Shoulder sleeves and patches of Russian soldiers after fighting in the Kyiv region. April 8, 2022 The Ukrainian project "I Want to Find" has received requests from Russians to search for more than 50,000 missing servicemen of the Russian Armed Forces.

Bohdan Okhrimenko, head of the Secretariat of the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, told ArmyInform in an interview. The project, founded by the agency, appeared with the growing number of contacts from Russian citizens who contacted the Coordination Headquarters to search for their loved ones who disappeared on the battlefield but did not receive the status of "dead." "Today we can state that the number of missing persons for whom we have received inquiries is more than 50,000 Russians.

And these are only those who are not afraid to contact us," said Okhrimenko.

Bohdan Okhrimenko, head of the Secretariat of the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War. Photo credits: Olena Khudiakova/ArmyInform

"According to our estimates, the Russians have more than 100,000 missing persons in total, and this does not include those we already know are dead," he added. Okhr?menko emphasized that most of the missing persons were dead Russian soldiers whose bodies the enemy army was in no hurry to evacuate from the battlefield and identify.

"It is beneficial for them to consider the military missing. Commanders keep receiving their salaries. The families do not receive anything," he added.

The data on 50,000 missing Russian invaders correlates with the number of DNA tests collected in Russia to identify the bodies of military personnel. In November, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anna Tsivilova announced that 48,000 samples had been collected. "As I said, we take the DNA of relatives, and they give it for free.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs takes them for free, at their own expense. We also enter all the relatives who come to us into our database. I have already said: 48 thousand," Tsyvilova said.

According to the relatives of Russian servicemen, only the relatives of soldiers who have the status of missing persons can take a DNA test for free. At the same time, Andrey Kartapolov, chairman of the Russian Duma Defense Committee, asked that "these figures not be voiced anywhere else" and that the information have been removed from the final documents. According to him, this is "classified sensitive information."

Illustrative photo of the cemetery of the mercenaries of the PMC Wagner.

Photo from open sources

In November, BBC journalists, together with the Mediazona publication, identified the names of 80,973 Russian soldiers who died during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine based on open data.

As of January of this year, the Horiushko project has identified more than 90,000 liquidated Russian military personnel by name.