The last time Olga Dovhanyuk spoke with her brother Serhi Nynshuk was on December 25, 2022. The soldier and father of three had warned his sister that he might not be reachable for a few days. He was about to take part in an operation on the front line of one of the most violent battles of Russia's invasion, in Bakhmut, where he had been fighting for several months, far from his home. Three days later, filled with anguish, Dovhanyuk contacted the soldiers of the group to which her brother belonged. "All those he was fighting with were in the hospital," recalled the misty blue-eyed young woman we met in Chernivtsi, a town in southwest Ukraine and close to the Romanian border, from where Serhi had left. "They said they had no information about him and didn't know if he had been able to leave the battlefield."

Since the disappearance of her brother, "a wonderful craftsman" whose "joking" nature she described in the present tense, Dovhanyuk and her family have been holding on to the hope that he is a prisoner of war, knowing that the Russian authorities do not always confirm the identity of soldiers captured on the battlefield. "We've been told that the worst must have happened to him," said the 22-year-old lawyer. "But we don't believe it. There are many stories of soldiers who had disappeared and came back from prison after a while. I keep hoping."

More than eight months have passed. Nynchuk's name was added to the list of 24,000 Ukrainians on the Ministry of the Interior's missing persons register. Out of them, "more than 8,000 people have already been found and returned home" since the start of the invasion, explained Oleh Kotenko, the commissioner appointed to investigate missing persons cases since April 2022. "Some have been brought back alive [in prisoner exchanges]," he added. "Unfortunately, many of them have also been found dead."

'We know from our investigations where their bodies are'

Of the names currently on the register – 85% of whom are soldiers – "we have zero information about just over 6,000 people" who disappeared without a trace from the battlefields, explained Kotenko in his Kyiv office. His main task is to identify missing soldiers and recover the bodies left behind where the fighting took place. As for the other 10,000 people or so, "we believe some are being held captive by Russian forces, and others are dead," explained the official, who reports to the Ukrainian Ministry of Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories. "We know from our investigations where their bodies are. One day, we will return them to their families."

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