Angry Families of Missing Russian Soldiers Want Answers From Putin

Natalia Kruglova last spoke to her husband, Pvt. Ivan Petrov, on Sept. 29. The Russian army conscript told Kruglova he had been ordered back to the front lines in southeastern Ukraine. Then he disappeared.

Kruglova wrote to her husband’s commanding officers, the Defense Ministry and even military prosecutors in search of news, but to no avail. Weeks later, the army declared Petrov missing but offered no explanation of what had happened to him.

“It’s as if no one owes you anything, no one cares,” Kruglova, 45, said in an interview from her home in the Russian far eastern city of Magadan.

Since President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, Russia has dispatched hundreds of thousands of men to battlefields that have become charnel houses.

Now, the mothers and wives of servicemen whose fates are unknown have emerged as some of the most vocal critics of the Russian war effort, presenting a rare public challenge to Putin and the authoritarian system he has built.

Amplifying the grief and anger is the Russian government’s lack of transparency about soldiers who are missing or presumed to be dead.

Groups involving tens of thousands of missing soldiers’ relatives and friends have sprouted up on Russian social media, where they share information in the hopes of discovering what happened to the missing men.

The specter of that many people in Russia searching for missing soldiers—and airing grievances about the lack of help from the military—challenges the Kremlin’s narrative that Russians support its war in Ukraine and are willing to sacrifice their loved ones for it.

While the tensions don’t yet present a significant threat to Putin, they could eventually spill over into broader dissent.

The Kremlin has suppressed domestic coverage of the war and offers no official figure for soldiers missing in action. The last time Russia’s Defense Ministry provided a public accounting of the number of its soldiers killed in Ukraine was in September 2022, when it said 5,937 had died. The U.S. estimates that more than 300,000 Russian troops have been wounded or killed.

Under Russian law, soldiers aren’t declared dead unless their bodies are recovered, a medical examiner issues a death certificate, or a court officially rules on the individual’s demise. In the chaos of Ukraine, many go unaccounted for. Thousands have deserted, according to advocacy groups that support Russian service personnel. Many others have become prisoners of war.

Last May, Ukrainian military officials said Russia turned down an offer to repatriate the remains of 3,000 soldiers early in the war. Russia’s Defense Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment on the claim.

Sergei Krivenko, head of Citizen.Army.Law, a Russian human-rights group that advocates for Russian soldiers, said the military “didn’t prepare for such a volume of losses” and lacks special units responsible for extracting fallen soldiers from the battlefield. Moreover, Russian units have sometimes been forced to withdraw without sufficient time to collect dead bodies, he said.

Russian antiwar commentators believe the Russian military abandons dead fighters to avoid paying compensation to the families. Putin has ordered that families of soldiers killed in Ukraine be paid 5 million rubles, the equivalent of $54,600, in addition to previously set compensation of around $26,000 for military personnel killed in battle.

Neither the Kremlin nor the Defense Ministry responded to a request for comment on allegations that Russia abandons its war dead and is deliberately undercounting its losses.

In a letter to The Wall Street Journal, Alexei Zlovedov, adviser to Russia’s human-rights commissioner, Tatyana Moskalkova, said the agency is in constant contact with Russia’s defense and foreign ministries, “receives all the necessary information to inform relatives about the fate of their loved ones, and does everything possible to return wounded and captured military personnel.”

The commission is also working with the International Committee of the Red Cross and its Russian counterpart to search for missing persons and reunite them with their relatives located in both Russia and Ukraine, Zlovedov said.

That is little comfort for Kruglova. Her grief and desperation echo that of thousands of mothers and wives whose stories flood social media.

Despite suffering two serious head injuries, including one from a blast wave that broke his jaw, knocked out his teeth and kept him out of service for weeks, Kruglova’s husband wasn’t allowed to return to their home in Magadan, she said.

Together for seven years, the couple spoke almost every day while Petrov, 41, a truck driver before the war, was deployed.

Their last conversation was tinged with foreboding.

“He wanted to go home,” said Kruglova, a civil servant, who has been on disability for the past decade after five surgeries on her spine. “He understood everything, understood that they wouldn’t let him leave there. He knew he wouldn’t come back.”

Aislu Almanova said her husband, Kurmangali Almanov, who volunteered to serve in Ukraine, disappeared in September last year. She appealed to the Telegram group Nash Vykhod, or Our Way Out, to help find Almanov, 49. The day before he went missing, he had been on a mission in Krasnohorivka in the Donetsk region of Ukraine.

“I’ve been to see all authorities,” Almanova, a mother of three children who made clear she supports Putin and Moscow’s military campaign in Ukraine, said in an interview from her home in the southwestern Russian city of Orenburg. “Now I suspect that my husband may be in captivity. I’m looking for him in captivity.”

Alexey Koptilov’s brother-in-law Nikolay Prede went missing in late July after a battle near a village in Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region. Prede, who volunteered and later signed a contract to fight in Ukraine, was seriously wounded by shrapnel to the lung in October 2022, Koptilov said. He was awarded a Medal of Courage for saving a man and spent five months undergoing treatment. Although he had serious problems breathing, Prede was returned to duty, Koptilov said.

Koptilov learned that several other soldiers also disappeared following the July battle in eastern Ukraine when Prede went missing. Koptilov and the relatives of the other missing men joined together, calling the military hotline every day and tracking down soldiers in the same unit as those who had disappeared. Koptilov traveled 700 miles to Moscow from his home in Ufa in western Russia with a relative to hand-deliver a letter to the Defense Ministry, pleading for assistance in finding his loved one.

“We made so many appeals,” Koptilov said.

On Nov. 1, the family finally received a formal notice that Prede had been captured in Ukraine. They have received no updates since.

News that Tatiana Kolodiy’s son Vadim had been killed on the front lines of Ukraine came first in a message from fellow soldiers to the young man’s fiancée. It was less than two weeks after Russian soldiers invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Confirmation of the death of the 19-year-old contract soldier soon followed from the commander of his unit.

But without receiving his remains, Kolodiy said she couldn’t believe that her son was gone. Moreover, without a body, he couldn’t be officially declared dead.

“For a month they fed me lies that they would bring me his body,” Kolodiy said. It never came.

For a year, she searched for her son’s body, writing to his commanders and visiting military morgues where she was shown corpses and piles of smoldering bones. She showed up at Putin’s office but was denied an audience.

She eventually learned from her son’s comrades that he was among soldiers headed to Kyiv days after the invasion’s start with the mission of taking the city. A rocket flew into the gunner’s compartment of the armored reconnaissance vehicle in which Vadim was sitting. He died instantly, Kolodiy was told.

His remains were never recovered. A Russian court eventually ruled his death was official, after hearing testimony from members of his unit who were present when he was killed.

In April 2023, Russia’s State Duma adopted amendments to the civil code allowing soldiers fighting in Ukraine to be declared missing or dead within six months in the absence of information about their whereabouts. Previously, such a declaration occurred only two years following the end of a conflict.

Meanwhile, for Kruglova, it remains a waiting game.

“You don’t know whether you should look for the corpse or for your husband [or what],” she said.

Write to Ann M. Simmons at [email protected]