Russia's unified state register of missing military personnel only appeared in October 2025 – nearly four years after the start of the full-scale invasion. Until then, a country waging war with immense losses had no centralized mechanism whatsoever for searching for its own soldiers.

All this time, the search for the missing fell to those who had neither the resources, nor the authority, nor access to military databases – mothers, wives, and volunteers.

“A Particularly Acute Issue”

In December 2025, at a major press conference, Vladimir Putin himself called the search for missing military personnel “a particularly acute issue” and stated that the number of those being sought had decreased after the implementation of new mechanisms. This admission alone – nearly four years into the war – speaks more to the scale of the problem than any statistics.

According to 'Vedomosti,' numerous appeals continue to come from citizens due to the protracted process of assigning monetary allowances to relatives of the missing. A lawyer handling such cases also noted another, more alarming practice: there are known instances where missing personnel were registered as having voluntarily left their military unit – effectively as deserters, which deprives families of their rightful payments.

Telegram Instead of the Ministry

While an official register did not exist, its role was practically assumed by volunteer Telegram channels such as 'Search for Missing | Wounded SVO' and 'POWs SVO'. Activists and relatives themselves daily publish lists of missing persons, name by name, with call signs, birth years, and military ID numbers – data reaching them directly from combat zones, from fellow servicemen, and eyewitnesses.

According to the Belarusian publication MediaBrest, an official database of missing persons in the SVO did not exist in principle for a long time, so activists created it themselves – and, by their own admission, even the Russian Ministry of Defense itself used this database in disputed identification cases. In eighteen months of one such channel's operation, only six individuals listed as missing were found alive.

Forced to Search Through a Foreign Project

While Russia lacked its own system, thousands of Russian families were forced to turn to the Ukrainian project 'I Want to Find' (Хочу найти) for information – an official resource created by the Ukrainian Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War to facilitate prisoner exchanges. The project was designed for Ukraine's military and diplomatic objectives but became virtually the only functioning channel for Russians to obtain information about the fate of their loved ones.

According to the project's own data, over 60,000 search requests were received in its first three years of operation. January 2025 marked a record month with over 8,000 new inquiries. More than 15,000 requests concerned military personnel under 24 years of age.

In some appeals, relatives describe a similar scenario of forced recruitment: young soldiers have their mobile phones confiscated so they cannot complain about service conditions, and the family learns of a contract signed under duress when it's almost impossible to rectify the situation. Independently verifying the scale of this practice is difficult – the information is based on appeals from the families themselves, not official statistics.

The Family's Complex Arithmetic

'Sibir.Realii' (a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty project) described another, more difficult and ambiguous aspect of this story. According to a military lawyer interviewed, relatives themselves quite often do not want the military unit to officially declare a serviceman deceased – as long as the person is considered missing in action rather than killed, the family can continue to receive their monetary allowance, whereas official recognition of death changes the type of payments to a one-time compensation.

This is not a story of abuse, but rather a story of the extent to which the bureaucratic uncertainty of 'missing in action' status – with an unclear legal mechanism in place – forces desperate families to live for months, and sometimes years, between two statuses, unable to either bury their loved one or continue hoping with clarity.

What Has Only Just Changed

In October 2025, the Ministry of Defense announced the creation of the Main Coordination Center (ГКЦ - GKC) and a unified data register, which is intended to consolidate information from military structures, government bodies, and volunteer organizations – thereby officially recognizing and integrating into the system the very volunteer work that had previously bypassed the state.

The agency declared genetic examination the most effective method of identification and organized free collection of biomaterial from relatives across the country. The Russian Red Cross representation has also been collecting DNA from close relatives of deceased and missing military personnel for many years – a practice that, unlike the state register, existed throughout all the years of the war.

Relatives are still advised to primarily contact the military enlistment office at their place of residence, the Ministry of Defense's Military Social Center, and the state fund 'Defenders of the Fatherland' (Защитники Отечества). The Ministry of Defense specifically warns against contacting private individuals and organizations offering paid search services – a practice that clearly developed over the years while no state alternative existed.

In Conclusion

For nearly four years of a war with immense and to this day fully unconfirmed losses, the basic task – to understand which mobilized and contract soldiers are alive, who has died, and who is a prisoner of war – fell not on the shoulders of the state that called them to service, but on mothers, wives, volunteer Telegram channels, and a foreign, Ukrainian project.

The unified register has only just appeared. The question of how many families over these nearly four years never received a body, a status, or clarity, is not resolved by the register – it merely begins counting from the point at which the state finally decided it was time to count.