‘Stoking feelings of abandonment and helplessness’

Families of Russia’s missing soldiers built their own search network. The Kremlin accused them of working for Ukraine.

A new Russian grassroots initiative with the goal of forcing the authorities to make a genuine effort to search for missing soldiers is gaining traction on social media. While the Defence Ministry created a body nominally dedicated to doing just that in the autumn of 2025, Vladimir Putin appears to be the only person who believes it’s had an effect. Relatives of missing soldiers, meanwhile, insist that the agency, which has no website or contact information, exists purely for show. The independent Russian journalism project Veter spoke to members of the new grassroots group about why the state is so careless when it comes to searching for missing soldiers — and what happens to those who call it out.

Without a trace

Groups dedicated to finding missing Russian soldiers have existed on social media since the first day of the full-scale war. They usually work like this: a mother, wife, or sister of a missing soldier posts information about their loved one, hoping it might catch the eye of someone who knows what happened to them. Thousands of these posts have accumulated on Telegram and Russian social media platform VKontakte, all with accompanying photographs: stocky men who used to be labourers or security guards, toothless old men, former convicts, and sometimes boys who are barely more than teenagers.

On 23 June, 2025, 19-year-old Roman Artamonov, from Saratov, left to do his mandatory military service in the Zabaykalsky region, at a unit stationed near the borders of China and Mongolia, in the town of Borzya. Just two months later he signed a contract and was sent to Rostov, where he spent four months in training. On Orthodox Christmas, Roman was deployed on a combat mission near the village of Iskra in the occupied Donetsk region. Two days later his unit lost contact with him.

“Three months later the unit declared my son dead, citing certificate No. 1421, which states that neither my son nor his body had been found, and that searches through POW records and hospitals turned up nothing,” his mother, Elena Pisakina, said in a video posted on Telegram.

Under Russian law, when a soldier disappears, his command is supposed to declare him missing and search for him for six months; only after that can a court declare him legally absent. A person can be declared dead immediately after disappearing only if there is convincing evidence that “the special military operation participant went missing under circumstances that threatened his life”. This isn't merely a bureaucratic formality; while the six-month search is underway, the missing soldier's family continues to receive his pay. It’s for this reason that commanders tend to want to be rid of these “dead souls” as quickly as possible and simply declare the missing to be dead. Often families don't object either: once a soldier is declared dead, his family receives a death payment that varies by region but typically amounts to a substantial sum — around 10 to 15 million rubles (€106–160 million). This is why relatives of servicemen frequently skip over the legal “missing” stage altogether.

According to Mediazona, between 2023 and 2025 some 90,000 court petitions were filed in Russian courts seeking to have a soldier declared missing or dead. Of these, 26,000 were filed by unit commanders and another 20,000 by structures within the Defence Ministry.

In the remaining cases — nearly 40,000 — the identity of the plaintiff is not disclosed. Most, though not all, are connected to the war. Being declared dead doesn't necessarily mean a soldier will be searched for any more actively, or that his body will ever be recovered and buried. That’s exactly what happened with Roman Artamonov — his family still hasn't been able to bury him.

Elena appealed to the military prosecutor's office for help finding her son, pointing out that his body had never been found, but received no explanation in return. So she took her story to social media instead. Her video appeal was eventually published on the Telegram channel of a new movement, Bezvestny Polk (“Missing Regiment”), which she joined while searching for her son.

Bezvestny Polk emerged in April 2026 in the Yaroslavl region. It describes itself as a “union of families of servicemen who have gone missing in the zone of the special military operation”. Its Telegram channel grew quickly, and the group from Yaroslavl soon found likeminded people in other cities.

Veter managed to reach several of its members. Despite the open and lawful nature of their initiative, all of them chose to remain anonymous.

Bezvestny Polk is not yet a mass movement, but its profile is visibly growing on social media. Relatives of missing servicemen turn to it after finding no help in government offices. Unlike the numerous search groups that came before it, Bezvestny Polk is not simply a bulletin board, but a network trying to draw wider public attention to the problem. It also offers relatives of missing soldiers what practical help it can, mostly in the form of moral or legal support. Bezvestny Polk activists help draft appeals to Russia’s Investigative Committee, presidential administration, human rights commissioner, Red Cross, and other bodies, with the help of sympathetic lawyers working pro bono.

“We’re also in touch with veterans’ organisations, who raise this issue at their own events and look for ways to improve the search system,” members say.

On 23 April, activists announced plans for public demonstrations on 9 May in Krasnodar, Volgograd, and other cities, inviting participants to come out with photographs of their missing relatives. In some places these events did take place, though turnout was small.

As a civic initiative unconnected to the state, Bezvestny Polk has neither the authority nor the means to search for people in the combat zone directly. So instead they collect names and photographs, building a kind of virtual archive of soldiers stuck indefinitely between life and death. According to the activists, more than 9,000 people have contacted them so far.

‘He’s just a number’

In theory, the search for missing soldiers begins as soon as a commander realises a serviceman is missing. The military is supposed to determine whether he disappeared during a combat mission or deserted. These two scenarios trigger different procedures: in the first case, an internal investigation is launched; in the second, the soldier may be placed on a wanted list, charged under Article 337 of the Criminal Code, and lose his pay. According to Important Stories, soldiers who go missing during combat are often recorded as deserters, even when relatives can show they died in battle.

If a serviceman is recognised as genuinely missing — meaning he is likely dead or captured — information about him, the circumstances of his disappearance, and witness accounts are supposed to be entered into a unified database. Search teams, volunteers, and civic organisations are then supposed to recover remains and identify them.

In practice, the system often fails. Independent outlet Verstka has reported, citing soldiers, that troops are warned before deployment not to expect evacuation from the battlefield, and that whether bodies are recovered depends on conditions in a given sector and decisions by local commanders. The speed of recovery and identification also depends on rank: officers’ bodies are found and returned more quickly.

“How do they treat some storm trooper who died somewhere? He’s just a number we report up the chain to the division and then forget about,” one anonymous soldier told Verstka.

The Defence Ministry’s Main Coordination Centre (GKTs), established in autumn 2025, is officially responsible for coordinating searches for missing soldiers whose deaths cannot be confirmed. Families can submit requests through enlistment offices, the Defenders of the Fatherland Foundation, or the Defence Ministry’s website, but there is no direct way to contact the GKTs itself.

Relatives say the centre exists only on paper. “The GKTs has no website of its own, no section on the ministry’s site, no actual office, no phone number, and no email address,” activists say.

Human rights ombudsmen involved in searches report successes, saying their work helped locate more than 300 missing servicemen in 2025 and around 100 more in the first half of 2026, mostly among prisoners of war and hospital patients. Activists, however, argue that the GKTs has shifted responsibility to regional enlistment offices, which lack the necessary resources, trained staff, and access to updated DNA databases.

The Kremlin takes a different view. Putin has said the creation of the GKTs made searches more effective, claiming that the number of missing people had fallen by half since the start of the year. It remains unclear where these figures came from, as Russian authorities keep casualty figures and missing-person data secret.

Ukraine has been more open about such information. In spring 2025, the Ukrainian project I Want to Find shared its data with Verstka. The project accepts requests from relatives of Russian servicemen and searches its databases of prisoners of war and the dead. According to Verstka, it received more than 84,000 requests over a single year.

A ‘prank’ that got out of hand

But even the entirely apolitical demands of Bezvestny Polk, which does not oppose the war and only wants to determine the fate of missing soldiers, are met with hostility by the Kremlin.

Soon after its creation, pro-government propagandists quickly “discovered” that the new movement searching for missing soldiers was in fact a project of Ukrainian intelligence services — just as they claimed with the mobilised wives' movement before it.

In June of this year, for instance, the propaganda outlets War on Fakes, Lapsha Media, and Southern News Service alleged that “behind the patriotic facade lie clear traces of information operations aimed at destabilising society”. According to these outlets, Ukrainian intelligence services supposedly offer relatives of servicemen help with searches while collecting their personal data in order to later “hack their Gosuslugi government-services accounts and extort money”. Southern News Service further claimed that these “malicious actors” deliberately target relatives of servicemen, “stoking feelings of abandonment and helplessness in order to plant the idea that the state supposedly isn't searching for the missing, and that the only way to get things moving is through ‘self-organisation’ and public actions.”

Ahead of 9 May, some schools in the Leningrad and Rostov regions, the Krasnodar region, and occupied Crimea held lessons titled “Bezvestny Polk: Memory Cannot Be Blocked”, dedicated to the memory of soldiers missing in action. These events were unremarkable and barely distinguishable from ordinary patriotic programming. There were no ambiguous quotes, no calls to action of any kind.

A few days later, schools began deleting all mention that such events had ever taken place, without explanation. Strangely, an explanation soon “surfaced” via the outlet Sota. An anonymous source told the outlet that the Bezvestny Polk school events were just another prank in the vein of those staged by Belarusian prankster Vladislav Bokhan or Ukrainian prankster Yevgeny Volnov.

Yet no prankster ever claimed responsibility for the action, and activists insist it was a genuine initiative organised by teachers themselves, which their superiors later decided to discredit after the fact.

“There was no prank. There were arrangements with teachers. The only thing that happened afterward was renewed pushback — the teachers started getting punished. The ministry didn't approve, so they decided to spin it this way instead,” said Mikhail, a Yaroslavl businessman seen as the group's de facto organiser.

According to him, Bezvestny Polk faces opposition not only from pro-government media but from security services as well. At least two members are known to have been targeted so far.

The first incident took place in Lipetsk: on 6 June, activist Irina Chebotareva, described as the group’s local coordinator, stopped responding to messages. According to a missing-persons notice published by the local Union of Veterans of the Military Operation, she had spent a long time searching for her own husband, a soldier missing in action.

“Unfortunately, we still don't know what's happened to her. We suspect she may have been in police custody this whole time,” Mikhail says.

The second incident took place in the town of Shakhty in the Rostov region, where Bezvestny Polk is especially active. On 9 May, movement members joined the traditional Victory Day car rally carrying portraits of their missing relatives, and on 12 June they organised a small motor rally of their own.

According to activists, shortly before that, on 10 June, the Regiment's local coordinator, Valeria Klyuchnikova, was detained, with security services reportedly looking to investigate her for “possible involvement in terrorist activity”.

“They called Valeria in to the police station. They told her we don't have the right to organise a 'vehicle regiment', that it needs to be coordinated with the city administration and the police. They said it was connected to a terrorism threat. Valeria didn't mention any use of force, at least, but she was in shock,” recounts Anna, a Bezvestny Polk member who joined after her own brother went missing in action.

The activist says Klyuchnikova has been called into the police station several times since to give “some kind of statements”. Most recently, according to Anna, Valeria was detained while picking up a package containing a Bezvestny Polk flag and several T-shirts. Police officers, who had been tailing Klyuchnikova, confiscated the flag and one of the T-shirts before letting her go.

This is an abridged translation of an article by Boris Bogomilsky first published by Russian media outlet Veter.