The bodies of the two Ukrainian soldiers lay motionless in a field for months. Around them were blood stains and their rifles.
The soldiers’ relatives identified their bodies from aerial images collected by drones. Although it was unbearable to watch, it seemed clear: the two men, Pvt. Serhiy Matsiuk and Pvt. Andriy Zaretsky — were dead. However, more than four months later, the Ukrainian military is still listing them as missing, even though subsequent drone footage provided by a fellow soldier weeks later showed them still lying there.
“I want to have his grave where I can come and mourn all this properly,” said soldier Zaretsky’s wife, Anastasia, 31, who has been seeking closure since he was killed in November in the Zaporizhzhia region of the southern Ukraine.
This confusion, and the long and difficult process to obtain an official declaration of the deaths, are far from isolated cases and have emerged as another painful consequence of the two-year war.
Families, lawyers and human rights groups say the Ukrainian military is simply overburdened with casualties and unable to account for the thousands killed, adding to the anguish of soldiers’ families.
Relatives of the two men in the camp said that, as far as they know, the bodies are still lying on the ground in the Zaporizhzhia region of southern Ukraine.
The Ukrainian government does not reveal the number of soldiers missing in action. President Volodymyr Zelensky put the number of dead soldiers at 31,000 in February, and kyiv has said about half more are missing. (American estimates of deaths are much higher, suggesting that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died by last August.)
The high number of missing soldiers underscores the nature of the ubiquitous trench fighting, which often leaves bodies from both sides abandoned in large numbers in buffer zones between armies, clouding the picture of the war’s outcome.
Some of the missing soldiers from this war have been captured by Russian troops, but others may be dead and unidentified, lying in morgues as the government struggles to resolve the backlog and find out who they are.
The rising number of missing troops is a blow to Ukraine’s already battered morale, said Ben Barry, senior ground war researcher at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. “They just increase the pressure on Ukrainian society and on the military leaders and President Zelensky,” he said. “It’s a terrible problem.”
Frustration among civilians has increased over the lack of responses and has sometimes come to light. Last October there was a large protest in kyiv, and subsequent others in recent months, in which relatives demanded greater accountability for missing soldiers.
Ukrainian officials estimate the number of soldiers in Russian captivity to be in the hundreds, perhaps thousands, but they say it is difficult to know because Russia does not publish lists of prisoners of war. They say that in almost every prisoner exchange, Russia releases some soldiers that Ukraine had listed as missing in action (sometimes as many as one in five).
Confirming a death is particularly problematic when Ukrainian officials don’t have a body, but it can be a long and difficult process even when they do.
Ideally, the Ukrainian military would have compiled a central genetic database drawn from the bodies of the dead and the families of the missing, according to the International Commission on Missing Persons, a Hague-based group that helps governments. to conduct searches across borders.
Petro Yatsenko, spokesman for the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, said one difficulty was that many families were reluctant to send DNA samples while holding out hope that their loved ones were still alive.
But government testing is also piecemeal. Although Ukraine has 13 DNA laboratories in operation, the process of identifying a body can still take several months, said Artur Dobroserdov, Ukraine’s missing persons commissioner.
To avoid this bureaucracy, family members have intervened. They travel from morgue to morgue, sometimes with the help of volunteers, looking at bodies and trying to identify them first through photographs and then by asking relevant family members for genetic samples.
Tetiana Fefchak, a lawyer in western Ukraine, frequently goes to morgues to try to identify bodies and says she finds that process more efficient than waiting for official statements. “What do you suggest? Let them rot in there?” she said. “If you can do something for yourself, do it.”
A law passed in 2022 was supposed to simplify identifications by allowing soldiers to donate genetic samples before deployments. But the process is going “slower than we would like,” said a senior Ukrainian military officer familiar with it, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss an internal matter.
Relatives and advocates of the missing say poor communication from military commanders can sometimes make things worse.
Private Zaretsky’s wife said the brigade commander did not contact the family. “Another boy, who survived, took the great risk of telling me the story of how my husband died when the commanders did not,” Mrs Zaretska said. “I understand that there are many deaths but that does not give them the right to treat our relatives like this.”
Under Ukrainian military rules, combat commanders are not required to talk to relatives about missing people, said Yatsenko, the spokesman. The Defense Ministry, he said, keeps maps of Ukrainian remains on the battlefield between the trenches, in the hope of recovering them when the lines change.
Early in the war, the military accepted witness accounts of other soldiers’ deaths. But errors arose repeatedly. “During a tough battle, some soldier may lose consciousness, his comrades think he is dead and the Russians find him later,” said Olena Bieliachkova, who works for a Ukrainian group that helps families of missing soldiers or prisoners of war.
As a result, Ukraine’s military now insists on lengthy investigations into suspicious deaths, meaning families can live with agonizing uncertainty for months. For families, delays have a financial consideration, as well as an emotional one; Relatives of fallen soldiers receive 15 million hryvnia, or about $386,000, paid in installments.
A soldier’s relatives can go to court with evidence of a death to try to get official confirmation, but this process requires a military commission to investigate each case, which takes two to six months.
The delays only increase the financial burden on the cash-strapped government, because the families of missing soldiers, even if they are presumed dead, receive monthly salaries of about 100,000 hryvnia, or about $2,570, until the soldiers are officially declared dead. The cost of continuing those payments could potentially run into the hundreds of millions.
The closest historical similarities to the situation in Ukraine date back to the world wars of the 20th century, where the search for and identification of soldiers missing in action continues to this day.
As the war drags on, families become more desperate. Alyona Bondar’s brother has been missing since September.
“I feel a very careless attitude, nobody says anything, nobody looks for it,” said Bondar, 37 years old. In desperation, he sought the help of a fortune teller, who told him that his brother had survived. “But should I believe it?” she asked.
The families of Private Zaretsky and Private Matsiuk, the two soldiers lying in the field, learned of their fate from their friend Mykola, who survived.
The two men were picking up soldiers to take them off the front lines last October, said Mykola, who asked to be identified only by his first name, in accordance with military protocol. But while they were returning, his vehicle broke down. They got out and ran.
They were behind the others when a guided anti-tank missile exploded nearby and they fell into the field.
After Mykola reached the safety of the Ukrainian trenches, his fellow soldiers flew a drone over the bodies of their friends. They were still, clearly dead. Mykola said he had returned the next day to try to lead them to a Ukrainian trench. He was injured by shrapnel and is now partially paralyzed.
“It was very important to me to recover their bodies,” he said. “For a year we were together and we ate from one plate, they did the same for me. I just feel the need to at least bury them.”
Thomas Gibbons-Neff contributed with reports.