After every conflict, sometimes every battle, the dead are buried, the wounded are cared for, and efforts are made to free prisoners. And then there are the invisible. Those who cannot be found, neither alive nor dead, those whom the war has swallowed up. The missing, whose families hope for their return. It's an anxiety that can last an eternity.

With their eyes glued to the screen and headphones on, Natalia, Olha, Anastasia and their colleagues took calls from families of the missing. "Our work is suffering and grief," said Natalia. "Absence means uncertainty. Families go through hell. One day they think the missing person is dead, and the next they're coming back. They wonder whether the search they are conducting is sufficient. They sometimes reproach themselves for continuing to live without thinking of them at every moment."

Natalia, Olha, Anastasia and the others work at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) call center in Kyiv. Every day, they try to answer the questions of families of the missing. Even when they don't have an answer, they listen and advise, hoping to "ease the suffering," said Anastasia.

A specialized structure

Following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the ICRC set up the largest search operation for the dead, wounded, prisoners and missing since the Second World War. It created an ad hoc structure, called the "Central Tracing Agency Bureau for the International Armed Conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine" (CTA-B), based in Geneva, with branches in Kyiv and Moscow.

Only the International Red Cross could launch such an operation. The Swiss institution, founded in 1863 to help the wounded on the battlefield, is the guardian of the Geneva Conventions and lays down the rules of international humanitarian law, also known as the rules of war. It is not a United Nations agency and it is not involved in politics. It is a fully-fledged, sovereign international entity, with observer status at the UN.

"Impartial, neutral and independent," the ICRC is unique because its role is officially recognized by every country on the planet. The fact that its "delegates," as the organization calls them, engage in dialogue with states obliges it to a very strict duty of neutrality and confidentiality, which is sometimes misunderstood or badly accepted.

When Russia launched its military attack on February 24, 2022, the ICRC was unprepared, despite eight years of experience with the war in Donbas. Known and respected in the humanitarian world as the "first to arrive, last to leave" organization, it evacuated its teams in the same panic as foreign embassies. That was unusual. At the same time, the ICRC president at the time, Peter Maurer, embarked on a tour of Kyiv and Moscow that did not go down well in Ukraine. His warm embrace of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in front of the TV cameras was also unusual, leaving Kyiv resentful of the institution.

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