For months, Elvira Kaipova had not heard from her son Rafael, a Russian soldier deployed in Ukraine.
Military officials responded to her repeated questions about his whereabouts by saying he was on active duty and therefore incommunicado. Then, late last November, two days after they again made that assertion, she learned that he’d gone missing on Nov. 1 — from a Telegram channel that helps military families.
“We lost your son,” Aleksandr Sokolov, the officer in Rafael’s unit in charge of family liaison, told her when she traveled to its headquarters in western Russia.
“Lost him how?” she says she responded, alarmed and angry, especially when the officer explained that after Rafael had failed to check in by radio, a search had proved impossible. “How do we search for him?” she says the officer told her.
Variations on that grim scenario have been repeated countless times since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The Russian Ministry of Defense lacks any formal, organized effort to track down legions of missing soldiers, according to bereaved families, private organizations that try to assist them and military analysts. Relatives, stuck in limbo, fend for themselves with scant government information.
The ministry itself declined to comment for this article. Mr. Sokolov, the liaison officer, said in a text message: “You do realize that I can’t comment on anything.”
