More Than 23,000 Names in Ukrainian Register of Missing Persons

Information on more than 23,000 people has been entered into the Unified Register of Missing Persons since the beginning of May. Over the year, the Office of the Commissioner for Missing Persons has identified the whereabouts of approximately 8,000 Ukrainians and returned the bodies of more than 1,500 fallen Ukrainian soldiers.

Oleh Kotenko, the Commissioner for Persons Missing in Special Circumstances, announced this during a briefing.

“Since the beginning of May, the Unified Register of Persons Missing in Special Circumstances has been operational… All relatives who are looking for missing persons, who filed a report on a missing person to the National Police, and those who applied to the Office of the Commissioner for Missing Persons, [information on missing persons] has been entered into this register. This is over 23,000 people,” the official said.

He added that this does not mean that all people went missing in special circumstances.

According to the data of the Office of the Commissioner for Missing Persons, 23,700 persons, who were reported on by relatives, were automatically entered into the register.

Kotenko noted that the whereabouts of about 8,000 missing persons had been determined for the year of operation of the Office.

For the year of its activity, the Office of the Commissioner for Persons Missing in Special Circumstances has checked about 150 liberated settlements for burials, worked on more than 500 locations in the de-occupied territories, and returned the bodies of more than 1,500 fallen soldiers.

Currently, seven special groups work on the front line – in the Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolayiv, and Kherson regions. Every day, members of the groups go out in search of bodies.

Kotenko added that the process of pre-selection of DNA material from defenders will be launched in Ukraine shortly, which will make it possible to speed up the process of identification in case of death.

Bohdan Marusyak