About 10 thousand are in captivity: the number of missing Ukrainians has been named

The missing persons register includes everyone who has disappeared since 2014.

During the Russian-Ukrainian war, about 63 thousand people were added to the Unified Register of Missing Persons . This data was provided by the Commissioner for Missing Persons in Special Circumstances, Artur Dobroserdov, in an interview with Suspilny .

“More than 60,000 people are wanted. We have confirmation that about 10,000 are in captivity. This includes both official confirmations – from the aggressor country through the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) – and unofficial ones,” he explained.

According to Dobroserdov, unofficial sources include testimonies of those released from Russian captivity, as well as OSINT searches. He emphasized that Russian citizens, enemy military personnel, post information on the Internet, from which the fact of people being held in captivity is recorded. With the help of such sources, more than one and a half thousand missing people have already been identified.

The register of missing persons includes all those who have disappeared since 2014. It contains data on military personnel and civilians, stateless persons, and foreigners legally residing in Ukraine. Data on unidentified bodies is entered separately.

People remain on the register until two events occur:

a person is released and ends up in territory controlled by Ukraine or abroad,
After the examinations, a decision is made to identify the body as belonging to a specific person who was considered missing.

In most cases, civilians are included in the register of missing persons due to the occupation of territories. However, this does not apply to everyone who ended up in the territory occupied by the enemy. If a person is in contact with relatives or acquaintances in the controlled territory, and no illegal actions are taken against him, a missing person report is not filed.

“But there are other stories when civilians are detained, tortured, they disappear and no one knows what happened to them. In such cases, reports are made to the police. Or it is monitored by the media in the occupied territories. All this is recorded and further data is collected on where this person went,” Dobroserdov added.

Captured and missing Ukrainians

On April 19, 2025, 277 Ukrainians returned home from Russian captivity as part of a prisoner exchange. Among them were servicemen from the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the National Guard of Ukraine, the State Special Transport Service, and border guards. They defended Mariupol and other areas in the Donetsk, Kherson, Zaporizhia, and Luhansk regions.

In total, more than 4,000 people have already returned home from Russian captivity. During the last exchange, Margarita Vinograd and her son Ruslan were released . They left Azovstal together and knew nothing about each other from that moment on, until they accidentally met on a bus.

It is worth noting that relatives of prisoners and missing defenders are being attacked by scammers . The Verkhovna Rada Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, said in February that criminals call people, pretend to be employees of international humanitarian missions or charitable organizations, and try to extort money – in particular, to supposedly deliver parcels to the defenders held in captivity.

(c)UNIAN 2025