Ukraine announced Tuesday that it has identified nearly 37,000 civilians and soldiers who have been missing since the start of the Russian invasion, an undercount due mainly to Moscow’s occupation of nearly 20 percent of the country’s territory.

“Nearly 37,000 people are reported missing: children, civilians and soldiers,” Ukraine’s human rights commissioner Dmytro Lubinets said on Facebook, releasing the latest tally as Kiev estimated at the end of February that 31,000 of its soldiers had been killed in the war.

“These numbers could be much higher,” he stressed, however, as the census is still ongoing.

Since the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, tens of thousands of people, civilians and soldiers, have been killed, but there is no total count from a reliable source.

Procedures to identify dead or missing persons often take months.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said in late February that 31,000 soldiers had been killed in the two years of the war, one of the rare times Ukraine has given an official death toll.

The Russian military very rarely announces its military casualties, and these numbers are believed to be vastly lower than the real numbers.

The number of civilian casualties is also unknown because there is no reliable information available regarding the territories Russia has seized since the start of the invasion, which has led to the destruction of towns and villages.

The case of Mariupol, which was besieged in the spring of 2022 by Russian forces and is now occupied territory, is emblematic. According to Kiev, tens of thousands of people died there and were buried under the rubble or in mass graves.

In addition, according to Dmytro Lubinets, “almost 1,700” Ukrainians are “illegally detained” by Russia.

Finally, Kiev estimates that at least 20,000 children have been displaced from Ukraine to Russia from the occupied territories in these two years.

According to Kyiv, just under 400 have been repatriated by Ukrainian authorities at present.

The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant in the spring of 2023 against President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s children’s rights commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for their role in the “deportation” of children from Ukraine to Russia. The Kremlin rejects these accusations.