ICRC receives 182,000 requests to trace missing persons linked to war in Ukraine

From February 2022 through December 2025, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) received approximately 182,000 requests from families in Russia and Ukraine seeking information about relatives who went missing during the war in Ukraine, according to the Russian branch of the organisation.

The requests concern both military personnel and civilians, including children. An ICRC representative told the Russian business daily Vedomosti that the figure does not reflect the full scale of the problem, noting that the actual number of families searching for missing relatives is significantly higher. 

The ICRC obtains information about prisoners of war through official lists provided by the national information bureaus of the Russian Federation and Ukraine. These lists are exchanged between the parties to the conflict and transmitted to the ICRC’s Central Tracing Agency in Geneva, which serves as a neutral intermediary and stores the data in a secure system.

Based on the information received, the ICRC informs families when it can confirm that their relatives are being held in captivity. The organisation did not disclose how many of the 182,000 requests originated from Ukraine and how many came from Russia.

The ICRC emphasised that many cases of missing persons remain undocumented. 

By Sabina Mammadli