The process of locating the missing is expected to take years, even after the fighting ends
More than 15,000 people disappeared during the war in Ukraine, according to an official of the International Committee on Missing Persons (ICMP).
The organization, based in The Hague and founded after the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, opened an office in Kyiv in July to help Ukrainians locate missing relatives. The program’s director for Europe, Matthew Holliday, said today that it was unclear how many of the people who were forcibly taken elsewhere are being held in Russia and are alive, or whether they died and were buried in makeshift graves.
The process of locating the missing will take years, even after the fighting ends, Holliday told Reuters in an interview. The figure of 15,000 is a “conservative estimate” given that in Mariupol alone, for example, authorities believe at least 25,000 people were killed or missing.
“The numbers are huge and the challenges facing Ukraine are great,” he added.
Holliday made the remarks after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on the United Nations to punish Russia for strikes on energy infrastructure that plunged many Ukrainian cities into darkness and cold.
By compiling DNA samples into a database, ICMP has traced more than 27,000 people out of the 40,000 who had been reported missing in the former Yugoslavia’s wars. In Kyiv, he has begun collecting DNA samples and believes this process will also help prosecutors in their war crimes investigations. “The key now is to put in place all the right measures to ensure that as many people as possible are identified. “Most of the missing, the dead, are victims of war crimes and the perpetrators must be held accountable,” Holliday said.
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