No trace of more than 60,000 people in Ukraine, a litmus test for the peace process

Of the 10 points that Volodymyr Zelenskiy made in his “Peace Formula” — a document that, although not completely discarded, has been relegated by the steps taken by Donald Trump in his dialogue with Moscow — the fourth is perhaps one of the most complex. The Ukrainian president said, when he presented it back in November 2022, the following: all Ukrainian prisoners, including civilians, held in Russia and in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, including Crimea, must be released. There is a first obstacle to that objective: there is no definitive figure for prisoners of war.

On February 3, Ukraine’s Commissioner for Missing Persons in Special Circumstances Artur Dobroserdov estimated that 62,948 people were registered and being sought by his department, which is part of the Interior Ministry. Among them, civilians and military personnel; adults and children. But there are more complications: it is also not known for certain where they are, and whether they are being held on invaded Ukrainian territory or inside the Russian Federation. Nor is it known who their guardians and custodians are.

The numbers of missing people are moving almost as much as the frontline trenches. The starting point, especially in the case of civilians, is the registration of their names by a family member in a database such as the one managed by Dobroserdov. But missing people are not always reported and, furthermore, access to such a registry is not easy. This was acknowledged last Thursday by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which mediates — or attempts to — between the parties to guarantee the proper treatment and eventual return of those detained during the development of a conflict.

The latest figure documented by the ICRC’s Central Tracing Agency, which has its own database, is some 46,200 missing citizens. “This is probably the largest number of ICRC missing persons cases in the world at the moment,” Patrick Griffiths, the organization’s spokesman in Ukraine, told EL PAÍS. “The tragic thing is that this is possibly the tip of the iceberg.”

Mariano García Calatayud, a Spaniard, is one of thousands of civilians captured by Russia in occupied areas, about whom almost nothing is known. The 76-year-old Valencian, married to a Ukrainian woman, moved to Kherson, in the south of the country, in 2014 to work in the humanitarian aid sector, assisting children displaced by the Donbas war in the east. In March 2022, García Calatayud was arrested near his home after participating in protests against the Russian occupation. It was learned, through the military prosecutor’s office of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, that he had been imprisoned in Simferopol (Crimea). Also, through some released fellow prisoners, that he had been tortured. In December 2023, the Russian authorities informed his lawyer that he was no longer in Crimea and that his whereabouts were unknown.

Whether in one place or another, it is the closest thing to limbo. As in the case of García Calatayud, thousands of civilians — arrested at the beginning of the invasion in the center, south, and east of the country, or later in the occupied territories between Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Donbas — are neither prisoners of war, nor are they detained under firm charges. They are, perhaps, hostages of the conflict.

Another Ukrainian organization tracking missing people is the Center for Civil Liberties (CLC), the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize winner. According to data provided to this newspaper by the CLC, its records include 16,000 civilians who have not been heard from since Russian troops arrived in their lands. In many cases, it is not even known whether they are alive or dead.

A trump card for Moscow

The Geneva Convention, adopted in 1949 as the basis of humanitarian law in a war, protects armed and unarmed actors. In practice, Russia holds military personnel (prisoners of war) and Ukrainian civilians detained in its offensive in its jails, while Ukraine only has Russian POWs in its penitentiaries. Prisoners are released one by one, soldier for soldier, so civilians are not included in the exchange, a trump card that Moscow will use in future negotiations.

On February 5, Ukraine recovered 150 military personnel held in prisons guarded by Russian troops. They were members of the Navy, the Air Force, Airborne units, the National Guard, the State Border Guard and the Territorial Defense Forces. Among them was also a police officer. Moscow also saw another 150 of its military personnel held captive on Ukrainian territory returned. This brings the number of members of the Ukrainian security forces and the army released by the Russian authorities to over 4,000 in the three years of conflict.

Thousands of children

But if there is one group of citizens in the hands of Russia that particularly affects the psyche of Ukrainian society, it is the tens of thousands of children. The authorities in the country consider them “kidnapped.” Last Thursday, the Russian news agency TASS reported that Moscow had handed over eight minors to Ukraine thanks to the mediation of Qatar, a country that is often involved in such operations. It is a drop in a desolate ocean.

According to figures presented to the UN Security Council last December by the Ukrainian Presidency’s adviser on repatriation of minors, Daria Zarivna, only 1,042 children have been returned home, a ridiculous figure in light of the total number of minors in the hands of the Russian authorities that Kyiv has identified, by name and surname: 20,000.

Despite Moscow’s denials, this case has led to the only arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Vladimir Putin in the context of the Ukraine invasion. Along with the Russian president, the ICC is seeking the arrest of his commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova. They are allegedly responsible for the forced deportation of Ukrainian minors. According to the intelligence gathered by Zelenskiy’s government, these children are removed from their parents — by force or after their death — or taken into orphanages in occupied territories. The aim: to naturalize them as Russian citizens or to put them up for adoption.

Tracing these children in Russia is a difficult task given the lack of communication between the two countries. According to a recent investigation by the Yale School of Public Health, at least 314 of these children have entered a program designed by the Kremlin for possible adoption by Russian families. Another 67 children have already been granted Russian citizenship. Both the American research center and the Ukrainian authorities believe that the real numbers are much higher.

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