2024-04-16 12:31:41
(Kyiv) Ukraine announced Tuesday that it had identified nearly 37,000 civilians and soldiers missing since the start of the Russian invasion, an incomplete number due in particular to Moscow’s occupation of nearly 20% of the national territory.
Published at 8:31 a.m. Updated at 11:21 a.m.
“Nearly 37,000 people are missing: children, civilians and soldiers,” Ukrainian human rights commissioner Dmytro Loubinets said on Facebook, according to a new count while Kyiv had estimated the number of its soldiers at 31,000 at the end of February. killed in this war.
“These figures might be much higher,” he stressed, however, as the census work was still in progress.
Since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, tens of thousands of people – civilians or soldiers – have died, but there is no overall toll established from reliable sources.
And procedures to identify dead or missing people can take months.
President Volodymyr Zelensky indicated at the end of February that 31,000 of his soldiers had been killed in two years of war, one of the extremely rare cases where Ukraine has given an official assessment of its military losses.
The Russian army has only very rarely communicated its military losses and these figures are considered to be largely minimized.
The number of civilian casualties is also unknown, as no reliable information is available regarding the territories occupied by Russia since the start of the invasion, which led to the destruction of a number of towns and villages.
The case of Mariupol, besieged in the spring of 2022 by Russian forces and now occupied, is emblematic. According to Kyiv, tens of thousands of people died there and were buried under rubble or in mass graves.
In addition, according to Dmytro Loubinets, “around 1,700” Ukrainians are also “illegally detained” by Russia.
Finally, Ukraine estimates that at least 20,000 Ukrainian children were deported to Russia from the occupied zones in two years.
According to Kyiv, just under 400 have been repatriated by Ukrainian authorities at this point.
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant in spring 2023 once morest President Vladimir Putin and Russian Children’s Commissioner Maria Lvova-Belova for their role in the “deportation” of Ukrainian children to Russia. The Kremlin rejects these accusations.
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