Rising tide of Russian inquiries reveals army toll in Ukraine
In January, Ukraine recorded a record number of inquiries from Russians regarding missing Russian army soldiers, the Ukrainian Coordinating Staff for Prisoners of War reported on its Telegram channel.
According to the staff's data, in the first month of 2025, the "I Want to Find" project received 8,548 inquiries from relatives of Russian military personnel.
This is 22 percent more than in December and the highest in the history of the initiative.
Russians are searching for their loved ones
In total, since the beginning of the project, more than 60,000 inquiries about missing soldiers of the Russian army have been received.
The statement noted that this number does not include the deceased and represents only a portion of the actual number of missing, as it is based solely on official requests.
It is estimated that the actual number of missing Russians may be 2-3 times higher.
The staff confirmed that in Russian captivity, 1,790 soldiers were listed whose names were on the search lists as part of the project.
408 of them have already been exchanged for Ukrainian prisoners of war. It was emphasised that the steady increase in the number of inquiries in the "I Want to Find" project indicates the enormous losses of the Russian army in the war against Ukraine.
Meanwhile, according to "Mediazona," in 2024, Russian military units widely submitted applications to recognise participants in the invasion of Ukraine as missing or dead. In this way, the command removed them from the personnel list, paving the way for the recruitment of new soldiers.
According to journalists, more than 6,200 such cases were found, and thousands more applications from the second half of 2024 were classified, which may indicate their connection to soldiers fighting in Ukraine.
Putin's relative let it slip. Colleagues reacted
In December 2024, Russian Deputy Defence Minister Anna Cywileva, a niece of Vladimir Putin, stated during a round table in the State Duma that at least 48,000 Russians participating in the war against Ukraine are listed as missing without a trace.
The chairman of the Duma's defence committee, Andrei Kartapolov, who attended the meeting, called on deputies not to disclose these data.
"This is sensitive, confidential information. When the final documents are drawn up, we must ensure these figures do not appear anywhere," he said.
