VANYA KOLOMIYETS went missing in a firefight near Lyman, in the Donetsk region, on April 19th. One of the soldiers in his unit saw him fall, but was too badly injured to get to him. The area, fought over for several days and scattered with bodies from both sides, was overrun by Russians; the Ukrainians could not even use drones to see what had happened, because of Russian jamming. “There is no reliable information that he is lying there,” said Tanya Kolomiyets, his sister, speaking in Poltava, a region east of Kyiv, her voice heavy with the stress of uncertainty. Perhaps he is still alive.

Last month the Ukrainian authorities said that a little over 7,000 servicemen are missing in action. For families desperate for news, the fog of war is deepened by a complex bureaucratic procedure that straddles civilian and military jurisdictions and is often slow and unresponsive.

Anatoliy Ostapenko, a member of Ukraine’s parliamentary committee for veterans’ affairs, wants the government to do better. “If the state mobilises soldiers, it should have the responsibility for dealing with the issue when they go missing”, he says. Under current rules, Ukrainian soldiers who are missing in action are subject to the same procedures as missing civilians. The onus is on the family to report their missing loved one, and to keep track of the status of the investigation. The system should have been reformed years ago, says Mr Ostapenko.

Within 48 hours, Ms Kolomiyets’ parents received a notice from the local military registration office that Vanya had been listed as missing. But what will happen next is less clear. “We don’t know who to turn to, which doors to knock on,” says Ms Kolomiyets. Theoretically, families must first register their missing with the National Police, who create a case file which can then be forwarded to either the SBU, the internal intelligence services, or GUR, military intelligence, for further investigation. The Ministry of Reintegration of Temporarily Occupied Territories has the responsibility of oversight and co-ordination for all missing persons, whether military, civilian or children. In practice there is a myriad of agencies with overlapping jurisdictions, resources and expertise. “I don’t know who should investigate this case, to be honest,” Ms Kolomiyets says.

Others have similar bureaucratic problems. When Galyna Vasylevich’s husband was killed in June last year near Severodonetsk in Luhansk, several members of his unit saw him cut down by a tank shell, but his body was unrecoverable and he was listed as missing. A military investigation had to be conducted before the case was referred to the prosecutors’ office where his status was revised from “missing” to “murdered in occupied territory by the Russian Federation”. Mrs Vasylevich then had to hire a lawyer to obtain a death certificate. “We were waiting for the documentation for a very long time,” she says.

“The bureaucracy is terrible,” admits Mr Ostapenko. When families call him for help, he says, their complaints are most often about the lack of communication. “They feel lost,” he says Mr Ostapenko. “They go to the police station to talk to the investigator and are told, he hasn’t arrived yet, or oh, he’s just left.” Families call everyone they can think of to help: military commanders, the General Staff of the Army, the Department of Civil-Military Relations of the Armed Forces, ministries, local morgues. Hotlines don’t answer, files remain open, forwarded, pending. Mr Ostapenko knows one mother who waited nine months for her son, a National Guardsman missing in Mariupol, to be officially registered as missing.

Families are often forced to turn detective, scanning online videos of thin and hunched POWs in Russia or posting details about their missing loved ones on social media, and risking attracting Russian scammers who offer information for money. Mrs Vasylevich looked through pictures of dead bodies exchanged from Russia. “They were decomposing, I would enlarge the picture, look at the faces, at the teeth.”

“It’s mentally very difficult.” says Mr Ostapenko. “It’s something they might have expected investigators to do, but they have to go through this horror.”

Often bodies can only be identified through DNA. But laboratories are overloaded, and delays can run into months. The International Commission on Missing Persons, an NGO based in the Hague that developed protocols for identifying bodies after the Bosnian war, is offering its resources, but the Ukrainian authorities have dragged their feet in signing an agreement.

Ms Kolomiyets’s husband is an officer in her brother’s unit; so at least her family knows that efforts are being made to find out what happened. She hopes they will be able to retake the area where he was last seen. After her own ten-month ordeal of legal limbo, Mrs. Vasylevich is now able to claim state benefits that she and her children are entitled to, and she has planted a peach tree beside her window in commemoration. “My husband loved to plant trees,” she says. ”The tree will grow and I will see it.” ■