Ukraine’s missing people – how the disappearances erode morale

The Russians came for Tetiana and Oleh Plachkov while they were sleeping, bursting into their home late at night.

It was 25 September 2023 in Melitopol, south-eastern Ukraine, where the couple had grown up, fallen in love and married. Now their city was occupied by Russian forces.

The men were armed and dressed in black. As some began searching the house, seizing devices and documents, others led Tetiana and Oleh away in handcuffs.

The couple then vanished without trace.

Ukraine has listed more than 61,000 people as missing since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, both soldiers and civilians.

When troops go missing in action there is a chance they might eventually be included in a prisoner-of-war exchange. But civilians are returned very rarely: the Russians don’t usually admit to holding them.

Four months after she was detained, Tetiana was abandoned at a hospital in Melitopol in a coma. She had no clothes or medical papers and the soldiers who brought her left no explanation. She died without ever regaining consciousness.

Oleh has never been found.

“It’s so hard for me to think about what they did to her, and why. My mum was 51. She loved life. She was such a radiant person, then everything was cut short,” the couple’s only daughter, Lyudmila, cries quietly.

“If, God forbid, something has happened to my father it will kill me.”

Lyudmila’s phone is full of happy memories of her parents. She showed them to me on a recent visit to Ukraine, where she’d travelled to wind up the family restaurant business and give a DNA sample that might identify her father if a body is ever found.

It’s not something Lyudmila wants to contemplate.

The family were extremely close. Every day under Russian occupation, her parents would send reassuring video messages. “Morning, daughter! Just checking in,” Tetiana announces in one video, then swings the camera round to her husband who waves and grins in his dressing gown.

There are pictures from life before the war, too: laughing on a beach, dancing at a disco. The couple are full of energy and life.

When Russian tanks rolled into their city in early 2022, the Plachkovs decided to stay. The entire country was under attack in an invasion that Vladimir Putin had threatened, but most could not imagine until the first explosions.

In those first weeks, Lyudmila joined the crowds waving blue and yellow Ukrainian flags and shouting at the soldiers to leave. Then the round-up began.

In Putin’s Russia, fear is a way of rule: dissent is crushed and critics imprisoned. The aim is to punish the few and scare the rest into compliance.

Now the same principle was being imported to the swathes of southern and eastern Ukraine illegally claimed by Russia, with soldiers patrolling the streets.

There, those considered loyal to Kyiv were seen as traitors.

After a few months in that climate, Lyudmila fled abroad as a refugee. But her mother didn’t want to leave her city, her own parents or the business she and Oleh had built up. She also had faith in the Ukrainian military.

In late 2023, all the talk was of a counteroffensive in the southeast to take territory back from Russia and Tetiana believed Melitopol would be liberated.

“She was a strong optimist,” Lyudmila smiles. “I’d say, ‘mum, maybe you should leave.’ And she’d say, ‘Just a little more time. Our guys will push harder.'”

Earlier that year, Tetiana’s name had appeared online on a pro-Russian forum. It identified her as a ‘waiter’, a slur for those seen to be ‘waiting’ for liberation. Melitopol was full of informers.

“She definitely donated money and helped [Ukraine] however she could,” her daughter tells me. “Some people die on the battlefield and others die in occupation, helping Ukraine in other ways. To me, she’s a warrior. She knew the risks. But she had to help.”

By then, Ukrainians in occupied areas were being forced to take Russian passports. Russian citizens were brought in to staff schools, as well as police and prosecutors.

Eventually Tetiana and Oleh agreed to leave Melitopol if the Ukrainian army hadn’t pushed through by November. But in September, they were arrested.

Lyudmila was frantic. Unable to return to an occupied town, she wrote to every official body she could find, demanding answers as her grandmother began searching local police stations and prisons.

Then, in February 2024, came a call: Tetiana was critically ill, and Lyudmila’s gran could visit her in hospital – once she’d been questioned by the FSB security service. That’s how the family learned Tetiana was being investigated for espionage.

But by that point she was unconscious. A nurse later told Lyudmila her mother had arrived in hospital with severe bedsores, suggesting she had been immobile for some time. So where had she been and what happened to her?

Through sheer persistence, Lyudmila has gathered a thick file of documents on her parents’ disappearance but she says that none of the printed words make sense. They claim Tetiana had been passing information about Russian military personnel to Ukrainian intelligence, but the criminal case was only opened after she was brought to hospital.

Before that, the papers record that “unknown persons in military uniform” had taken her and Oleh in an “unknown direction” in September 2023.

Their whereabouts from then on is officially a mystery. But in Russia it is the FSB that handles espionage cases, including detention and interrogation, and it was Russian FSB officers who searched Tetiana and Oleh’s home.

“I’d like to believe her health deteriorated because of the poor conditions and lack of proper care, but deep down I understand that they tortured her,” Lyudmila believes.

Her view is formed from first-hand accounts of brutality in occupied territory, including from a restaurant singer charged in the same espionage case as Tetiana.

“They were probably extracting information,” Lyudmila says. “I know they like to use electric shock.”

The autopsy and a hospital report she obtained show that Tetiana died of pneumonia after a prolonged time on a ventilator. But why she was intubated initially isn’t recorded. Neither is what happened to Lyudmila’s father, Oleh.

“He is not on the lists of those detained, there is no criminal case against him,” a letter from the Russian Interior Ministry reads. Police have opened a criminal case for abduction but there are no suspects and no clues.

Lyudmila’s suffering is shared by many thousands of Ukrainian families. At a hotline in Kyiv run by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), most of the calls are from people searching for relatives lost in this war.

The phone operators gather detailed information, often in long and emotional calls, which they then send to a tracing database in Geneva.

Lyudmila has logged her own details here and elsewhere, but so far there have been no answers.

“There are always limits to what we’re able to do, and we have to be very realistic with families to manage their expectations. There’s a lot of pain and frustration,” ICRC spokesman Patrick Griffiths explains.

He is also countering criticism in Ukraine that the organisation doesn’t push Russia hard enough.

International humanitarian law obliges all states to report every detainee during an armed conflict, and provide access, but Russia simply ignores that. It’s partly because it sees all civilians in occupied areas as Russian and nobody else’s business. It’s also a display of contempt for the rest of the world’s rules.

The ICRC does have staff in Moscow and parts of occupied Ukraine, but whilst handing out aid is allowed, occasionally, touring Melitopol to search for secret prisons is not.

“There are a lot of families who… may never receive the answer they’re looking for,” Mr Griffiths cautions, adding that the ICRC can’t “force its way in” anywhere. “But the process of dialogue with the authorities, trying to improve our access, never stops.”

Ukraine’s own national search squad has even less access. The Office for Missing Persons in Special Circumstances amounts to just three police officers, based at the end of an Interior Ministry corridor in Kyiv. But their powerful facial recognition software can scan websites and media, hunting for an ever-growing list of the missing.

Russian bloggers sometimes post videos of detainees, or the dead. But a search for Lyudmila’s father draws a blank.

“Either he’s being held hostage and can’t contact relatives,” commissioner Artur Hnatovych explains before voicing the other alternative. “Sometimes, the bodies of civilians are returned to us along with our deceased soldiers. They are mostly in a very poor condition, so visual recognition is impossible.”

That’s why Lyudmila gave a DNA sample.

In occupied areas, the abductions have slowed as the full-scale war heads towards its fourth year, but they haven’t stopped.

The interior ministry recorded more than 1,000 new missing people last month but these days many of that number will be soldiers.

On the whole, Russia’s methods seem brutally effective: the staunchest supporters of Kyiv have either left occupied land, or keep their heads down and mouths shut. In some cases, Ukrainians who once fled such towns are now returning to live under Russian rule. For some, it’s better than being a refugee.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve heard some Ukrainians wonder out loud lately whether such land is still worth fighting for.

With the frontline barely shifting, certainly not in Kyiv’s favour, and soldiers dying each day, the country is starting to ask some very tough questions: about this war, the endgame and the immense costs.

In her own personal battle, Lyudmila still manages to find some cause for hope. Because sometimes the missing do resurface.

In 2023, Leonid Popov was detained in Melitopol, just like Lyudmila’s parents

He’d taken a photograph of Russian military hardware, was chased down the street by soldiers then disappeared.

Three months later his father got a call: Leonid had been left at a city hospital, exhausted and severely dehydrated.

The photographs his mother Anna has shared from that day are shocking: the young man’s ribs are clearly visible beneath his skin.

“He told me that he’d been in awful conditions,” Anna remembers talking to Leonid that day.

“He said, ‘mum, in a word, I was in hell.'”

Over the months, Leonid had been held and interrogated in multiple locations. “They were given plastic plates of buckwheat and a glass of water for about 20 people. When they said they were hungry, they were told to shut up or they’d be shot.”

His parents began making plans to get him out of Melitopol to safety. But as soon as he was discharged, he was detained immediately and disappeared all over again.

Like Lyudmila’s father, Leonid was officially listed as missing even though he’d been taken away by soldiers.

It was another whole year before his parents were told he was in pre-trial detention in Donetsk, another occupied city, and charged with espionage. Initially overjoyed to find him, they now worry about his health: Leonid has paranoid schizophrenia, managed with medication.

“They do not understand that for a person with such a diagnosis, it’s already deadly just to be in prison without his pills,” Anna worries. She has begun writing to Russian officials, pleading for Leonid to be included on a prisoner exchange list, on humanitarian grounds.

“No one could have foreseen this nightmare,” says Lyudmila. “Even now, as I talk about it, I can’t believe it’s real.”

She hasn’t chosen a photo for her mother’s grave, as if she’s stalling her grieving until she can find her father. But she’s run out of places to turn.

And now Donald Trump is back in the White House, with talk of negotiations to end the war. That won’t be quick or easy, if it happens at all, but it could force Ukraine to relinquish occupied areas like Melitopol to Russia.

“Maybe they’ll release the civilians if they think they’ve won?” Lyudmila tries to look on the bright side. “Or maybe it will get worse: a dead end.”

“Either way, accepting that this land is no longer Ukraine would be very hard.”

It is the land her parents defended and where they were happy and where, even now, Lyudmila believes Oleh could be held in a cold basement or a prison cell, still waiting to be found.

“I couldn’t save my mum, even though I tried so hard,” she says. “Now I need to save my dad.”

Production by Paul Pradier, Xavier Vanpevenaege and Svitlana Libet

Top picture credit: BBC

Byline image picture credit: Jonathan Ford

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