(C) OpenDemocracy This story was originally published by OpenDemocracy and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Ukraine’s missing soldiers: Families fight for answers over mysterious disappearances [1] [] Date: 2024-02 Piecing together the puzzle Relatives of missing soldiers often have only fragments of information on the last reported whereabouts of their loved ones – locations received on the rare occasions when they received a phone call or message. For frontline troops, communication is a privilege only for moments of inactivity on the Russian forces’ side. If the worst happens, sometimes relatives will receive the body of their loved one, and can bury them. Others may find a photo of the soldier in a Russian prisoner of war (POW) camp. If a soldier dies and it’s impossible to retrieve their body, their fellow soldiers will inform the next of kin that they saw them die. This is what happened to Dembovska, a mother of two, and other relatives of soldiers in her husband’s unit. After the Russian strike on their unit’s position, relatives were told by the unit’s commander, Yan Yatsyshyn, that their sons, husbands and brothers had all died. As Dembovska recalls, at first she believed the brigade’s claims that the scant remains of the seven soldiers’ bodies were in a morgue in Mykolaiv. DNA tests were to be conducted swiftly in order for relatives to hold funerals. Still, she expected an official account of her husband’s death. The Ukrainian military has procedures stating that relatives of missing soldiers must be informed of their deaths, and of what has happened. Each missing soldier’s brigade is then responsible for conducting an internal official investigation into the circumstances of their disappearance – which should take one to two months. (That said, there are conflicting opinions on whether a brigade is obliged to conduct an investigation during wartime.) When a soldier goes missing while fighting, their relatives must apply to the Ukrainian police to search for them as a “missing person under special circumstances”. The police should, in turn, open a criminal investigation and commission DNA profiling of any suspected remains. Yet the brigade’s investigation into the attack at the beginning of May 2022 did not materialise for months – and neither did a police investigation. There were several other things that led Kateryna Dembovska to question what she was told. As Dembovska recalled, her husband had sent her a video of his position in a destroyed village of three parallel streets, Novohryhorivka – a different building from the one the brigade later claimed he had died in – at the end of April 2022, and said: “Katya, this is so you know where to look for me.” In the days before he went missing, Volodymyr had expressed concern over whether he would survive, saying that nearby Ukrainian artillery was performing poorly. Fighting in the Mykolaiv and Kherson regions was heavy, and he claimed that he and his fellow soldiers were stationed in Novohryhorivka with Russian artillery raining on them. Ukrainian artillery deployed nearby, she said, did not return fire. As a result, Dembovska began to doubt that the bodies the brigade claimed to have retrieved were the right ones. Concerns about the conduct of her husband’s commander only compounded this doubt. Delayed investigation In the end, it took the 59th Brigade almost a year to start the investigation into the circumstances of the seven soldiers’ disappearance. Only in April 2023, according to a document seen by openDemocracy, did the 59th Brigade conduct its legally-required investigation into the soldiers’ disappearance. Until November 2022, the brigade claimed that they could not commence the probe because Novohryhorivka was in an active combat zone. The entire Mykolaiv region was declared under complete Ukrainian control on 11 November last year. In the meantime, explanations from the unit’s commander, Yan Yatsyshyn, did not satisfy the soldiers’ relatives, who alleged to openDemocracy that his account of the artillery strike changed over time. In telephone calls and Signal chats, Yatsyshyn told Dembovska that the soldiers had been burned to death in the basement of the building, that he was “personally at the scene” of the Russian artillery hit, and – in one version of events – that he had “personally extinguished the fire”. Yet Dembovska was told by her husband’s comrades that Yatsyshyn was rarely on the front lines with soldiers. When contacted, Yatsyshyn did not answer openDemocracy’s questions about the events of 8 May 2022 directly, but repeated the claim that he had been physically at the scene. Despite explaining what happened several times to Dembovska and relatives, Yatsyshyn says, he and other soldiers from the battalion could not persuade them to believe the truth. He claimed there was drone footage showing the moment the group of soldiers died, but did not share it with openDemocracy. Another soldier, the only officially documented survivor of the Russian artillery fire that day, refused to speak to openDemocracy. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/ukraine-missing-soldiers-dead-captivity-59th-brigade-volodymyr-dembovskyi/ Published and (C) by OpenDemocracy Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/opendemocracy/