Thousands of Ukrainians are disappearing. This is not new: Russia has deployed such terror tactics for decades
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskBucha is the tip of the iceberg. Thousands of Ukrainians have been abducted from Russian-occupied areas, including activists, journalists and humanitarian workers. Journalists Serhey Tsyhipa and Oleh Baturin were seized on March 12th while reporting on atrocities committed by Russian forces. “They were taken to an unknown place with bags on their heads,” says Anastasia, Mr Tsyhipa’s step-daughter.
Disappearances in Ukraine are not new. Between 2014 and 2021 over 2,000 people vanished; both pro-Russian forces and Ukrainian security services were implicated. Russia has deployed such terror tactics for decades. After it annexed Crimea in 2014, Crimean Tatar activists and community leaders disappeared in droves. During Russia’s two wars in Chechnya in the 1990s, disappearances were so widespread that Human Rights Watch said they amounted to a crime against humanity.
“There are over ten thousand that we know are missing, but this is certainly an underestimate,” says Katya Osadcha, a Ukrainianpresenter who set up a Telegram group called Search for the Missing. Police submitted over 9,000 missing-person reports from February 24th to May 24th, mostly from the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. The government claims hundreds of thousands of its citizens have been deported to Russia. Soldiers at filtration camps often confiscate people’s documents.
Ukraine’s missing-persons systems are patchy. In 2018 the country passed a law setting up procedures to document and trace those who had disappeared since the conflict with Russia started, but it became mired in bureaucracy. The new war could provide fresh impetus. “We had to discover new procedures of registration and ways of searching for missing persons,” says Alyona Lunova of Zmina.
Families like Anastasia’s are trying everything to get loved ones back. “The state has not done anything,” she says. She has applied to aworking group on enforced disappearances and is submitting a case to the European Court of Human Rights. “We do not know when Matviy will come back, but we will wait and he will return. There is no other way.”
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