at least 37,000 missing identified two years after the start of the Russian invasion

Children, civilians and soldiers. Ukraine announced on Tuesday April 16 that it had identified nearly 37,000 people missing since the start of the Russian invasion. However, this number is incomplete, due in particular to Moscow’s occupation of nearly 20% of the national territory. Additionally, census work is still ongoing. “These numbers could be much higher”, thus underlined on Facebook the Ukrainian commissioner for human rights, Dmytro Loubinets. According to him, “about 1 700″ Ukrainians are also “illegally detained” by Russia.

Since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, tens of thousands of people, civilians or soldiers, have died, but there is no overall assessment established from reliable sources. And procedures to identify dead or missing people can take months. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced at the end of February that 31,000 of his soldiers had been killed in two years of war, one of the extremely rare cases where Ukraine has given an official assessment of its military losses. Ukraine estimates that at least 20,000 Ukrainian children have been deported to Russia from occupied areas in two years. According to kyiv, just under 400 have been repatriated by Ukrainian authorities at this point.