By Kontur and AFP | 2024-02-21

GENEVA/MOSCOW -- The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is looking into what happened to 23,000 people who have disappeared in the chaos of Russia's war in Ukraine.

The agency said it was seeking to determine whether they had been captured, killed or had lost contact after fleeing their homes.

Shortly after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the ICRC created a special bureau of its Central Tracing Agency (CTA). The bureau is dedicated to searching for those missing on both sides in the conflict.

"Not knowing what happened to a loved one is excruciating, and this is the tragic reality for tens of thousands of families, who live in a state of constant anguish," CTA bureau chief Dusan Vujasanin said in a statement February 19.

"Families have the right to know what happened to their relatives and, when possible, to exchange news with them."

The ICRC said that over the past two years it had received more than 115,000 phone calls, online requests, letters and in-person visits from desperate family members from both Russia and Ukraine looking for missing relatives.

By the end of January, the organization and its partners had helped provide 8,000 families with information, it said.

The statement quoted some of their reactions after receiving news about a loved one.

"I didn't hear anything for about two months. I felt dead during this time," it quoted one person as saying after hearing their son was alive.

Vujasanin stressed however that many other families "remain without news."

Call for humane treatment

The Geneva-based ICRC set up its CTA system more than 150 years ago.

But the Russia-Ukraine division is the first dedicated CTA bureau set up for a specific international armed conflict in more than 30 years and is its largest operation since World War II.

It acts as a neutral intermediary between Russia and Ukraine, collecting, centralizing, safeguarding and transmitting information from one side to the other.

The ICRC stressed that families have a right under international law to know the fate and whereabouts of their missing relatives.

"People who are held by a party to the conflict must be treated humanely and the dead must be handled in a dignified manner," it said.

Ukrainian Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) Yevheniia Filipenko said there are large numbers of civilians being held by the Russian authorities.

"Russia refuses to provide access -- to any humanitarian or human rights monitoring or investigative mechanisms, or humanitarian actors -- to these people," she told a briefing with the UN correspondents' association on February 19.

"We in Geneva receive, on a daily basis, calls from the relatives of those who are missing. And every call is a human life. We understand that, and we are trying to do our utmost to find out the whereabouts."

She encouraged all possible international actors to help determine the whereabouts of those missing.

"But the major obstacle is Russia's refusal to provide access, to provide information," she said.

"There is a need to put pressure on Russia as an occupying power, but also as a party to the Geneva Conventions, to comply with the provisions of the Geneva Convention and to provide information about the protected persons under the Geneva Convention."

Ukrainian children repatriated

Meanwhile, 11 Ukrainian children returned from Russia February 20, AFP reported.

They crossed the border from Belarus to Ukraine that evening, in the latest return of children taken to Russia and occupied territories during the nearly two-year Ukraine war.

The children, aged between 2 and 16, were hosted at Qatar's embassy in Moscow on February 19 ahead of their long journey via Belarus.

This latest operation included several children with special medical needs, including two aged five and six who have chronic conditions.

Groups of children began to be transferred from Russia to Ukraine under the scheme in October.

Fifty-nine children have been repatriated to Ukraine through the mechanism, Russia said.

Kyiv has accused Moscow of dividing families and moving children from Russian-held parts of Ukraine to Russia to brainwash them, while Moscow has said it is doing this only for their safety.

The Hague-based International Criminal Court last year issued an arrest warrant for President Vladimir Putin and his children's commissioner on the accusation of unlawfully deporting Ukrainian children.

"Qatar has been working closely with its Russian and Ukrainian counterparts, making progress on the reunification initiative, but also looking for ways to build trust in other areas," Qatari Minister of State for International Cooperation Lolwah al-Khater said in a statement.

"We will continue to mediate between the two sides as long as it is requested, with the hope that it can eventually lead to a de-escalation in the conflict," she said.