For months, Elvira Kaipova had not heard from her son Rafael, a Russian soldier deployed in Ukraine.
Military officials responded to her repeated questions about his whereabouts by saying he was on active duty and therefore incommunicado. Then, late last November, two days after they again made that assertion, she learned that he’d gone missing on Nov. 1 — from a Telegram channel that helps military families.
“We lost your son,” Aleksandr Sokolov, the officer in Rafael’s unit in charge of family liaison, told her when she traveled to its headquarters in western Russia.
“Lost him how?” she says she responded, alarmed and angry, especially when the officer explained that after Rafael had failed to check in by radio, a search had proved impossible. “How do we search for him?” she says the officer told her.
Variations on that grim scenario have been repeated countless times since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The Russian Ministry of Defense lacks any formal, organized effort to track down legions of missing soldiers, according to bereaved families, private organizations that try to assist them and military analysts. Relatives, stuck in limbo, fend for themselves with scant government information.
The ministry itself declined to comment for this article. Mr. Sokolov, the liaison officer, said in a text message: “You do realize that I can’t comment on anything.”
Even if Russia and Ukraine reach a peace agreement, the hunt for missing soldiers is expected to endure for years, if not decades.
The defense ministry has not published any statistics about the number of missing, which military analysts and families say is because it does not know the number. Estimates run to the tens of thousands.
Anna Tsivilyova, a deputy minister of defense and a cousin of President Vladimir V. Putin, told the State Duma last November that 48,000 relatives of the missing had submitted DNA samples in hope of identifying remains, although that included some duplicate requests from the same family.
In Ukraine, “Want to Find,” a government project to help locate Russian servicemen captured or killed there, said it had received more than 88,000 requests for information, with over 9,000 in April alone. It noted that the overall number of missing is still unknown.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which tries to locate missing from both sides, whether civilians or military, has 110,000 cases submitted.
The family of Isakhanov Ravazan, a 25-year-old soldier, last received a brief voice message from him on Nov. 9. During a battle soon afterward, his aunt said, he radioed his commander that he could not stanch the bleeding from a bad wound. He has not been heard from since.
“No one saw him dead,” said his aunt, who, like several people in this article, did not want to be named for fear of falling afoul of laws against detailing battlefield losses. “Maybe he saved himself, maybe someone found him, we are still holding onto hope that he is alive,” she said. “There is no peace for the soul. I cannot sleep at night, and neither can his parents.”
Most missing soldiers likely died fighting and were abandoned on the battlefield, experts said. There are not enough teams to collect bodies, and the constant deployment of drones makes retrieval too dangerous.
Commanders have enough trouble delivering 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 declined to use his name to avoid jeopardizing relatives still in Russia, said only families of the soldiers care if bodies are collected, “and there is no punishment for alienating relatives.”
A Ukrainian man from the occupied city of Luhansk, who was dragooned into service as a battlefield medic and who also declined to be identified, said of his experience: “Hundreds of people were left lying out there. Every day, dozens were wounded or killed.”
Even when bodies are retrieved, identification is problematic. Often remains can be removed only after the battle lines shift markedly so that attack drones fly elsewhere, and that could take months or even years.
The military morgue in the western city of Rostov, officially known as the Center for the Reception, Processing and Dispatch of the Deceased, is the main clearing center.
When she learned that her son was missing, Ms. Kaipova, who is married and has one other son, flew there first. “Everything is overcrowded,” she said, arriving at 7 a.m. to submit a DNA sample and leaving at 10 p.m. “Wives, mothers, fathers — all crying, sobbing, waiting.”
Investigators there told her and others that they face a backlog of around 15,000 unidentified servicemen. The sluggish pace, the constant referrals to different government agencies and the lack of basic information has families of the missing on a slow boil. Anger overflows from numerous online chat rooms where relatives seek help.
In one comment on the Vkontakte social network, a participant named Polina Medvedeva lambasted military commanders as “irresponsible.” Some of her husband’s comrades told her that he had died heroically, she wrote, but the military has not confirmed his death and there is no body.
“Where are the specifics?” she wrote. “Why is the command ignoring 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 go even more public.
Relatives of missing soldiers from the 25th Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade from the Leningrad region have made repeated appeals to Mr. Putin.
“Everywhere we encounter indifference!” they said in a video last month showing pictures of the missing. Every family receives exactly the same form letter and is just told, repeatedly, to wait, they said, “Help us! We are tired of living in ignorance for months and years!”
The Kremlin established the Defenders of the Fatherland State Foundation, ostensibly to help soldiers, veterans and their families. But it has no inside track on details about the missing, analysts said.
There is “no system of liaison with the soldiers’ families,” said Sergei Krivenko, the director of a human rights organization formed to help soldiers. He called the Fatherland Foundation a “fake structure,” designed to deflect blame from the defense ministry and “to give a semblance of action.”
The Fatherland Foundation did not respond to requests for comment.
Ms. Kaipova has written to numerous officials starting with Mr. Putin, visited his administrative office and searched through multiple hospitals, including some amid the fighting in eastern Ukraine. “I run in circles,” she said.
Her quest took a not uncommon turn when she thought she recognized Rafael with a grievous head wound in a short video clip filmed aboard an evacuation helicopter. She is convinced he is lying in a hospital somewhere afflicted with amnesia.
The administrator of one chat group where she posted the video said at least 20 other people identified the same man as their missing soldier.
“Everyone is so desperate that they see their loved ones in any face,” Ms. Kaipova conceded, but dismissed any suggestion that this might be the case for her as well. Her son’s unit said its medics have no record of evacuating him.
Rafael was a reluctant soldier. Raised in the central city of Tyumen, he seriously injured another man who tried to take his car. Officials presented him with a common choice in Russian criminal cases: Go to jail or to the front. His mother begged him to chose jail, but he recoiled. “He was in agony, pacing,” she said. “He did not want war or prison.”
He deployed last Aug. 1, his 20th birthday. She never heard from him again. A hospitalized soldier from his unit once called to tell her that Rafael had cried out for his mother in fear at the start of his first battle.
She learned from Form 1421, the terse military record of his disappearance, that he served with an intelligence unit. Rafael was among a group of soldiers carrying out “special tasks” in a Donetsk province village, it said, when they came under fire from artillery and drones. “The group, which included Rafael Kaipov, lost contact after this engagement.”
Under new laws, commanding officers can go to court just six months after the last contact with a soldier to have him declared missing, allowing them to halt his combat pay.
The families themselves have to file an additional case to have the missing soldier declared dead, which releases hefty benefits. Some shun such a definitive step.
“I cry constantly, morning and night,” Ms. Kaipova said. “My biggest fear is that I will exhaust every lead and have no one left to turn to.”
Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.
