More than 15,000 people have gone missing during the war in Ukraine, an official at the Hague-based International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) said on 24 November in an interview with Reuters.
According to the ICMP’s program director for Europe, Matthew Holliday, it was unclear “how many people had been forcibly transferred, were being held in detention in Russia, were alive and separated from their family members, or had died and had been buried in makeshift graves,” Reuters wrote.
The process of investigating the missing in Ukraine will last years even after fighting stops, Holliday told Reuters in an interview. The 15,000 figure is conservative when considering that in the port city of Mariupol alone authorities estimate as many as 25,000 people are either dead or missing.
