By Olha Chepil | 2025-02-20

KYIV -- Thousands of relatives of Russian troops have turned to a Ukrainian state initiative called I Want To Find to seek information about their loved ones who have gone missing in the war in Ukraine.

The number of requests hit a record high last month. The I Want To Find chatbot received more than 8,500 requests from Russians in January.

The project, which began in Ukraine under the Coordinating Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, grew out of the Ukrainians' desire to prompt prisoner of war (POW) exchanges, Oleksandr Sementsov, a spokesperson for I Want To Find, told Kontur.

Since the service went live in January 2024, it has received more than 60,000 requests for information on missing Russian servicemen.

"[We] found 1,790 Russian troops alive among POWs. Of those, 408 have already returned to Russia through prisoner exchanges," Sementsov said.

Sifting through data

I Want To Find gives Russians information about the status of their loved ones who went to fight in Ukraine so the Russians can then ask the Kremlin to carry out prisoner exchanges.

The search is a monotonous process involving tables of data, other documents and photos of the missing servicemen, along with photos of bodies and other remains from morgues and from search units of the Ukrainian military, said Sementsov.

"The relatives often don't provide enough information about the serviceman, or it's not precise -- they don't know when or where they went missing, or they don't tell us the numbers of the ID tags, and so on," he said.

"So the first step of the job is often to standardize the data: to clarify the information and check errors."

The next step is to compare the information from the request to information about Russian servicemen who are in all the locations where Ukraine is holding POWs.

Sometimes the personal information from a request coincides only partially. In those cases, verification is done based on photos. In the case of dead troops, photos are used for preliminary identification if possible.

"When we're dealing with remains, we can look for matches only if we have documents, ID tags, a phone or other personal belongings found nearby," Sementsov said.

Russian relatives are most interested in finding out a POW's health condition and whether they can have a video call with them or send a package.

In other cases, relatives ask for a short video showing the POW that they can send to his local draft bureau as proof, so that he can be classified as a POW and put on a list for an exchange.

"We publish cards of POWs every day," Sementsov said, referring to I Want To Find's system of posting the photos and names of Russian POWs on Telegram.

Battlefield losses

Russian relatives have a hard time finding the truth back in Russia, analysts say.

They are forced to hunt for evidence themselves that their relatives were captured, and then to prove it to the relevant Russian military units, draft bureaus and defense ministry.

"Someone goes to fight, and that's that," Ihor Chalenko of Kyiv, director of the Center for Analysis and Strategies, told Kontur.

"If something happened to them, the idea of accomplishing anything at the Russian draft bureaus is unrealistic," he said. "There are hundreds of video recordings about this [stonewalling] on the social networks, on Telegram, and the Russian authorities aren't responding in any way."

As a result, the only option left for Russians is to turn to the Ukrainians.

The avalanche of queries from Russia correlates directly to the extent of Russian losses on the battlefield, said Chalenko.

For instance, about 7,000 Russian troops died in Pokrovsk, Ukraine, in January, Viktor Trehubov, a Ukrainian military spokesman, said on United News February 6.

"By comparison, 6,000 Russians died in the entire Second Chechen War [1999-2009]," he said.

During the three years of the full-scale invasion, 300,000 to 350,000 Russian troops have died and 50,000 to 70,000 are missing, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in an interview with British journalist Piers Morgan on February 4.

"Seventy thousand, that's about 15 brigades missing just like that," Chalenko said. "Let's also recall the direct requests from various Russian volunteers who are screaming ... that they don't even have enough body bags to remove the dead troops."

Mothers abandoned to their tragedy

Each family's story is a unique tragedy.

In 2013, Tetyana Kolodiy-Shmyrina moved with her family to Moscow from Mykolaiv, Ukraine. Her children received Russian citizenship.

Her son, Vadym, 19, was promised a free education and a career in the Interior Ministry. He served six months as a conscript and signed a contract to continue serving as a professional soldier.

On February 24, 2022, he went to fight in Ukraine. Three days later his mother lost contact with him.

"Other servicemen and witnesses said he died. They didn't return his body, and no DNA test has surfaced," Kolodiy-Shmyrina told Kontur. "In February it will be three years since he disappeared. No one is saying anything now. The people I was in contact with changed their phone numbers."

Six months after Vadym disappeared, authorities classified him as missing. After another eight months, his military unit petitioned a court to recognize him as dead, based on statements by eyewitnesses.

According to Kolodiy-Shmyrina, the court extended the process for nearly a year, and she spent the entire time searching for her son and anybody who could provide any information.

"I contacted everyone I could. People gave me phone numbers, addresses, pointed me to the authorities. Everyone threw up his [or her] arms. I didn't get a shred of information I needed," Kolodiy-Shmyrina said.

She is now alone with her two daughters.

No one in Russia is helping her, Kolodiy-Shmyrina said. She is in touch with mothers of men who served in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and of those fighting in Ukraine. Everyone tells her that there is no help or support, and that mothers of missing troops are abandoned to their tragedy.

Kolodiy-Shmyrina has now reached out to I Want To Find and is awaiting a response.

"Right now it's really hard to find any straws to grab, but I'm still hoping," she said. "As long as I'm living and breathing, I'm going to wait and believe in a miracle."