30,000 civilians went missing in Ukraine after the beginning of the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation

The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP, Office in The Hague) has information on 30,000 Ukrainian civilians who have gone missing since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. On October 19, the director general of ICMP, Catherine Bomberger, announced this.

“At the moment, it’s about 30,000 people. And that’s just civilians. And right now, I’m not sure exactly who that number includes. We’re trying to figure out what those numbers are and what they mean. […] This includes many different circumstances under which people have gone missing,” she said.

The head of the international organization emphasized that the numbers continue to grow.

Bomberger said that she has been dealing with missing people in Ukraine since 2014, in particular, she was in Slovyansk, Donetsk region, where mass burials were discovered, but now there are more such cases.

“It is very important that all these facts are verified within the framework of the judicial process and that these investigations are conducted by judicial institutions,” she believes.

On October 5, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Leonid Tymchenko said that in Ukraine, more than 26,000 people are wanted as missing under special circumstances. According to him, approximately 15,000 are military personnel, 11,000 are civilians. Data on each of them was entered into a special register coordinated by the Main Directorate of Intelligence.

The aggressor country of the Russian Federation launched a war against Ukraine in 2014, when it occupied Crimea and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. On February 24, 2022, Russia launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine from the northern, eastern, and southern directions.

In April 2023, the defense forces expelled the occupiers from the northern regions of Ukraine, in the fall they de-occupied parts of the Kherson, Mykolaiv, and Kharkiv regions.

On June 5, 2023, the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine announced that the defense forces had taken offensive actions in some directions. Later there were reports of the de-occupation of settlements in the Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions.

Mass burials of Ukrainians were discovered in the de-occupied territories.