Lidiia Liakh, 77, last saw her son a few days after Russian troops invaded Ukraine in early 2022, occupying her village outside Kyiv. She is pressing for official answers about his fate.
On the steps of Maidan square in downtown Kyiv, Lidiia Liakh stared solemnly into the crowd of demonstrators as yellow and blue smoke filled the air.
It’s been more than two years since her son disappeared, and the 77-year-old can’t stop thinking about what might’ve happened to him. Over that time, she started looking for ways to distract herself from the pain, and that’s how, on this cold March day, she came to be surrounded by this group of more than a hundred people who all share the same anguish. They came together to raise public awareness that Ukrainians, many of them civilians, are missing.
Ms. Liakh opened her winter jacket to show off a T-shirt with her 42-year-old son’s face, alongside a message demanding the release of captives. She said her son disappeared on Feb. 27, 2022. It was just days after Russia began its full-scale invasion, and Russian troops had already occupied her village outside of Kyiv. Her son was not a soldier, but he had been working with activists to disrupt Russian advances, including changing the directions on roadside billboards. One day, he left home to find a car repair shop and never returned.
While Ms. Liakh tells her story, Iryna Protsenko, 33, stands behind her, anxiously waiting to share hers.
In an occupied village in Kharkiv region, Ms. Protsenko’s father – a retired 56-year-old – left home in search of medicine. She said her dad was driving with an acquaintance when they were stopped by Russian troops. After three days, mostly spent in a basement, the other man was let go, but her father was kept captive – perhaps, the other man said, because he had been too patriotic toward Ukraine.
March's demonstration at the Maidan was to raise awareness of how many families are in the dark about whether their loved ones were captured or killed.
Ukrainian officials say that more than 30,000 people have been reported missing since the beginning of the full-scale war. This number includes soldiers who went off to fight and haven’t been heard from since – but also a significant number of civilians. Some of them were dragged away from their homes by Russian soldiers who occupied their villages, while others are being held captive in regions of Ukraine that Russia continues to occupy.
Across Ukraine, people are desperately looking for these loved ones. Family members, investigators, police, forensic experts, human-rights organizations and government officials are all involved in the search. It often starts with families calling everyone they can think of who could help: the International Committee for the Red Cross, the national police, government officials and local organizations.
To aid in the search, Ukraine launched a registry containing information about each missing person.
Eventually, some people do find out where their loved ones are – but for many, the questions remain.
“Some people, activists you see here – among them are some people who got information about their relatives who are in Russian captivity so they know they’re still alive, but I don’t have any information about it,” says Ms. Liakh. “I tried to call everywhere to ask for help.”
Halyna and Vasyl Khyliuk hope to be reunited someday with their son, a journalist captured by Russian troops in 2022, but there has been no news of him in a year and a half.
In a village outside of Kyiv, Halyna Khyliuk told her story from her living room, her husband Vasyl Khyliuk sitting beside her.
At the moment, all they know about the whereabouts of their son Dmytro, a 48-year-old journalist, is that he was taken to Russia and is being held captive there. The last time they saw him was March 3, 2022, when their village was under Russian occupation.
Russian soldiers forced Mr. Khyliuk and Dmytro to undress as they searched their bodies for patriotic Ukrainian tattoos.
They covered their faces and led them to a warehouse, and later another location, where they were held with other civilians. Days later, Mr. Khyliuk was freed, but Dmytro wasn’t.
Dmytro’s parents, both in their 70s, have never stopped looking for him. They even hired a lawyer to contact Russian authorities, calls which went unanswered.
Finally, they found out Dmytro was in Russian captivity after calling one of several hotlines for relatives of missing people.
'Dear Mom and Dad, I am alive, healthy, and doing well,' reads this letter from Dmytro dated April 14, 2022.
But the most tangible form of evidence came when they received a letter from Dmytro, dated April, 2022, but delivered months later.
He wrote that he was okay, but not much more than that – likely because the correspondence would’ve been censored.
Ms. Khyliuk said they later got a call from someone with the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only organization with the mandate to visit people who are detained, who confirmed that their son was still alive.
“I’m so desperate because when I contact responsible organizations in Ukraine who are trying to help us with this case they say, ‘We’re doing our best but no success because Russia doesn’t want to let him go.’”
She looked helplessly around the room. Wallpaper is torn in places from when Russian soldiers still occupied their village, and stayed in their house. “Tears are coming,” she said. “We’re two retired elderly people, we don’t know what to do.”
“I just want to see him and I’m worried that I won’t be able to do it because it will take too long.”
Advocates for missing Ukrainians want captured civilians in Russia to be returned home, which Moscow has so far been unwilling to do.
Ukrainian officials told The Globe and Mail they’re doing everything they can, but that Russia won’t return civilians.
Dmytro Lubinets, Ukraine’s human-rights ombudsman, is responsible for overseeing the return of all Ukrainians, including children, civilians and soldiers.
He said when it comes to civilians, he considers them to be hostages, and Ukraine needs support from the international community to get them back.
Mr. Lubinets said the world has galvanized around the issue of Ukrainian children who were forcibly transferred to Russia, with the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants against Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova. Mr. Lubinets said he believes cases involving all civilians in Russian captivity should be similarly advocated for.
“We try to communicate with our international partners that we must recognize all activities of Russian Federation, all unlawful detainees, as genocide of the Ukrainian nation and as a war crime of the Russian Federation.”
As of March, he said, more than 3,000 Ukrainians have been returned from Russian captivity, but only 147 of them were civilians, while the rest are soldiers. He said he can’t share the details of how the civilians were released.
Graves honour the 'temporarily unknown defenders of Ukraine' at a cemetery in Dnipro, close to the eastern regions where fighting has been most intense.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been contacted more than 115,000 times by Ukrainian and Russian families searching for loved ones, said Achille Després, the spokesperson for the ICRC in Ukraine. However, he added, that doesn’t reflect the number of people who are missing because someone may contact them multiple times.
“That’s just to give you an idea of the scale,” he said, adding that they have 23,000 cases that are currently open. But this number, he added is “just the tip of the iceberg” and most of the people ICRC has heard from are relatives of those who joined the military.
Families contact the ICRC because of the organization’s role as a neutral intermediary between the two warring parties. The ICRC uses information provided to them by families to help search for missing loved ones, following up by talking with officials and prisoners of war who were repatriated, visiting people in places of detention and communicating with Russian authorities.
When they receive lists of people held captive from Ukrainian or Russian officials, if there is a match with a family looking for someone, they call the family directly to let them know they have located their loved one.
He said the ICRC has been able to inform more than 8,000 families about the status of their relatives.
Liudmyla Chychera keeps a board of photos to remind her of Mariupol, the city she fled in the early days of the invasion, and her husband, who she has not seen since.
Some are missing loved ones who are living in regions that are still under Russian occupation, making it difficult to get information about them.
Liudmyla Chychera fled Mariupol to Cherkasy, in central Ukraine, where she’s set up an office for a non-governmental organization called Halabuda – meaning handmade hut built by children, similar to a fort – in Ukrainian – which she has run with her husband and other volunteers since before the full-scale invasion. The walls are full of reminders of her home city, including portraits of their team and photos of Mariupol.
Ms. Chychera said her husband is a well-known volunteer and activist in Mariupol, and when the war began in 2014, he dedicated his time to do volunteer work in support of military units. Later, along with other volunteers, the two of them founded Halabuda, one of the most active NGOs in Mariupol, and focused on social and educational initiatives.
When the full-scale invasion began, they turned their space into a warehouse for storing military and humanitarian supplies. By Feb. 25, Ms. Chychera felt it was too dangerous to remain in the city, but her husband wanted to stay to continue to help.
They said a rushed goodbye in the parking lot outside their office, surrounded by people. If they’d had more time, she said, she would have told him to be careful and remind him of how much he’s done for Mariupol.
When Ms. Chychera reported her husband missing, she says Ukrainian officials were only able to help with psychological and legal issues, but not in securing his return.
The last time they spoke was March 16, 2022, by phone. She asked him why he hadn’t left yet and he told her that he had to stay until the end. “I said, ‘Until the end of what?’” But the connection dropped before he could answer.
She said she waited to report him as missing because she had heard that Russian soldiers were looking for him, and she didn’t want to put him in danger. People had still been getting out of Mariupol, so she hoped he would one day appear.
When she decided to seek help, she reached out to Ukrainian officials and organizations involved in the search, hoping to put his case on everyone’s radar, but all they could offer her was psychological assistance and help with legal questions.
But without evidence about what’s happened to him, Ms. Chychera remains hopeful.
“If there is no proof he was killed, he could be alive,” she says.
With reports from Kateryna Hatsenko
Ms. Chychera is hopeful her husband might still be alive, given the lack of evidence to the contrary.
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