The disappeared in Ukraine: Beyond the war’s death toll, thousands of Ukrainians have gone missing. Their families are desperate for answers

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This article was published 23/04/2022 (880 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Russian forces stormed the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, Nazar Litvinov took shelter with his girlfriend, her family and more than a thousand other civilians in the local drama theatre.

Cellphone reception was spotty in the besieged city, but Litvinov would regularly scramble up to the eighth floor of a nearby building to check in while awaiting evacuation.

His last contact was on March 12. Four days later, Russian aircraft bombed the stately red-roofed building, killing an estimated 300 people.

Litvinov has not been seen or heard from since. But his mobile telephone flickers to life every few days, says his sister, Snezhana Lytvynova, citing information the family has obtained from Ukrainian authorities.

The Mariupol cellphone towers have been destroyed, like most everything else in the city, but it appears someone has been making regular calls to check Litvinov’s voicemail.

“The last call was on the 19th of April — a few days ago,” Lytvynova said in an interview. “There is hope that it is him and we think that if it is him, then he must be in Mariupol most probably.”

Not all have such hope.

On the second day of the war, Mykola Stepanyuk, a 29-year-old tank driver in Ukraine’s military, went into battle in defence of Melitopol, a key city north of the annexed Crimean peninsula. He has not been heard from since.

The tank’s gunner was killed in battle and has been buried, but in Stepanyuk’s case there’s no evidence of life nor signs of death, Svetlana Tumanova, his sister, said in an interview.

It is impossible for his family to search in Russian-occupied Melitopol, so they do what they can — appealing everywhere and to everyone for information. “So far, we know nothing.”

An estimated 12 million Ukrainians have been displaced, having fled their homes and their country since the Feb. 24 Russian invasion began, to safer places within Ukraine or beyond. But Ukraine’s disappeared make up a vast and so-far-uncounted group.

They are people who went out for food or help and never returned. Children who boarded evacuation buses bound for safety and instead vanished. Those who have suffered injuries or succumbed to them, somewhere unknown, far from family and loved ones.

Galina Novichkova is haunted by the faces.

From her home in a village on the Dnipro River, south of Zaporizhzhia, she wades through the images of those who have gone missing, submitted by desperate family members. She started working as a volunteer administrator on a Facebook page to help locate missing children a year ago.

Like most everything else, the initial intent of the page has been overtaken by war. It now serves as a repository of Ukraine’s tragedy and its terror.

There are branches of the Facebook group for the cities of Kherson, for Berdyansk, for Donetsk, for Kyiv. Many of the disappeared were last in Mariupol.

“Families call me — ‘They’ve been found alive!’ When someone is found alive, it’s such a joyful moment,” Novichkova said in an interview. “But when the news comes that a person has died, it’s obviously difficult to take such horrible news.”

The fears that she has been dealing with online are drawing closer as Russian forces push into Ukraine from the south and the east.

On the morning of April 8, the 16-year-old son of Oleg Buryak, the head of the Zaporizhzhia regional administration, was stopped at a checkpoint in the village of Vasylivka by Russian soldiers, according to a statement the politician made to Ukrainian media.

The boy, Vlad, was part of an evacuation convoy in the car with two women and three young children.

“They saw my son’s phone and they pulled him out of the car,” Buryak said.

After a three-hour search, the Russians discovered the teenager was the son of a local politician. Those present begged for the boy’s release, the statement said, but instead watched as he was detained and driven off by his captors.

“In our oblast it is the first case of a child being taken away at a checkpoint,” Novishkova said.

The disappeared are struck seemingly at random.

• One 15-year-old girl was driving with her parents and nine-year-old sister near Bucha, the Kyiv suburb that was the site of alleged atrocities, when the car came under fire. The parents were killed and the teen, shot in the leg, was taken away by Russian troops.

She has not been heard from since.

• A seven-year-old girl was seriously injured in a bombing in Donetsk that killed her mother. She was taken to hospital but her father and relatives cannot be found.

• A grandmother born in the Second World War, when Russians and Ukrainians fought side by side, was wounded and went missing in the war Russia now wages against its neighbour.

• A young man jumped off a bridge in Gostomel to avoid shelling on the second day of the invasion and has gone missing without a trace.

• An elderly woman from Mariupol sent a desperate message, hoping it would be found by her daughter: “I’m alive. I am in Maternity Hospital No. 2, on Pashkovsky Street. I made it here somehow. Our house burned down. I don’t know what to do anymore.”

Oksana Lavrik’s son was serving with the 36th Marine Brigade when he lost contact, leading her to fear the worst. She searched for him desperately until she found a photo of him on April 1 on a Facebook page and learned he had been taken prisoner by the Russians.

He looked horrible, she said in an online exchange. “Tortured,” in her words, though she could not tell if he had suffered any physical injuries and has been unable to speak with him.

At least her son is alive. Russia claimed on April 18 to have killed 23,367 Ukrainian fighters, while Ukraine claims to have killed 21,200 Russian soldiers.

Novishkova got a similar update on a missing family from Mariupol that had turned up alive — and 1,000 kilometres away — in the Russian city of Tula.

“I don’t know the reasons why they ended up there, but I think it’s clear,” she said. “People don’t have the choice. Their only option is to save their lives and the lives of their children and family.”

Ukrainian officials claim that half a million of their citizens, including 121,000 children, have similarly been forcibly evacuated to Russia or Russian-controlled territory. When humanitarian corridors have been established, the ones organized by Russian forces lead to so-called filtration camps, Ukraine alleges.

The Ukrainians describe these camps as processing centres run by Russian security agents. They say there are searches of telephones, computers and other belongings. Men are searched for incriminating tattoos and special attention is put on finding local Ukrainian authorities, soldiers, foreign fighters and activists who may be among the evacuees.

These accounts are supported by a number of independent journalistic reports.

Sergiy Kyslytsya, Ukraine’s permanent representative to the United Nations, told the UN Security Council this week that Russia was abducting local authorities and activists while forcibly transferring an estimated 25,000 Ukrainians through two such centres.

“Such actions of the Russian invaders can be qualified as kidnapping and require a resolute response by the international community,” Kyslytsya said.

Russia portrays these centres as simple reception camps where people fleeing the war can access emergency services and relocation assistance and a one-time payment of 10,000 rubles. From these points, it is said, travel is organized to more than 25 regions of Russia willing to accept Ukrainian refugees.

The only point the two sides agree on is the number of people who have left Ukrainian-controlled territory.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees says that 578,255 Ukrainians have entered the Russian federation as of April 21. The bulk of Ukraine’s war refugees have fled toward Europe — 2,867,241 in Poland alone — and the refugee agency has warned about the risks of human trafficking and sexual exploitation facing those women and children in need of transport, accommodation and employment.

As she does her part to try and connect the grieving with their dead, the mothers with their children, the wives with their soldiers, Novishkova also sees the conflict encroaching. But she is filled with uncertainty about the future.

“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know. I don’t know. I can’t answer. For now I’m staying home,” she says, the anxiety mounting along with the tears.

She explains that she has a husband, two children, a dog, two cats and her garden, which is also her livelihood.

“We’re staying here. We will remain in our home. But if there is an evacuation, of course we will evacuate.”

That sense of uncertainty is ever-present.

“I would say to you that everywhere is dangerous. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Where the next rocket will hit or in which city,” said Svetlana Tumanova, the sister of Mykola, the missing tank driver.

“We can only wait. Wait and then maybe when the war ends we’ll be able to get in contact. I don’t know.”

Allan Woods is a Montreal-based staff reporter for the Star. He covers global and national affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @WoodsAllan