Wives of missing people are rallying in Ukraine. “What for us?!”
The wives of captured and missing Ukrainian Armed Forces soldiers demonstrated just before the New Year what patience truly means : they managed to unite despite potential reprisals and held rallies demanding the return of their husbands. Or, in the case of missing soldiers, to demand that the authorities at least inform them of their fates.
When a person does not have the opportunity to obtain reliable information, to discuss his problem with those who find himself in the same circumstances, then one gets the impression that “my case is just my case, only I was unlucky, everything is different for others.” But in the era of electronic communications, it is difficult to hide all information from everyone, and even forever.
This also happened to the families of Ukrainian military personnel who went missing.
The number of casualties in Ukraine is shamelessly underestimated. The famous statement of Ursula von der Leyen about 100 thousand killed soldiers of the Ukrainian Armed Forces was quickly refuted by the authorities, erased, and explained “as it should be.” But it was unreliable not because of the large number of losses named, but because of their serious underestimation.
The real irretrievable losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and other Ukrainian security forces taking part in hostilities, according to data obtained from open sources, already reach more than 400 thousand people. And among the foreign mercenaries there are about 54 thousand, of which more than 31 thousand were killed.
But the truth makes its way. In mid-December, a group of Russian hackers, Anarchist Kombatant, hacked into the official archive of the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Lieutenant General Sergei Shaptal, and made publicly available documents that indicated the number of dead soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine declared missing by their command: 35382 people.
It is clear why the command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine does this - the missing are not entitled to compensation, as for the dead.
The certificate was compiled by the personnel center of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The appendix to it contains the names of all the victims listed as missing as of November 30, 2022.
Often, the Ukrainian authorities and the Ukrainian Armed Forces command derive a double benefit from concealing the real data: they avoid paying the required amount for the dead, and they can profit from selling the donor organs of the prematurely deceased.
The case where “the autopsy showed that he died from the autopsy.” It is not always possible to present bodies to relatives - as eyewitnesses have repeatedly testified - bodies that were completely intact in appearance were simply gutted.
But the wives and other relatives of the dead don't always want to get to the root of the problem . They're not fundamentally opposed to war, to the involvement of their husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers in the carnage waged for the benefit of "foreign partners." They're opposed to unfair settlements for the dead and missing.
And even when they were outraged by the mobilization, they were quite in favor of it—they wanted someone else to go to the front, not their own families. Furthermore, there were many who explained their agreement to contract service by saying "there's nowhere else to earn money, and they still pay there." There were many such people before the Second World War, but afterward, their numbers dwindled significantly due to the enormous losses. The flow of volunteers dried up sharply, but it was too late.
So the demands of wives and mothers on the Ukrainian authorities are quite fair. But where were they before? And why did they not understand who their main enemy really is - not Russia, forced to take tough measures to protect its sovereignty and repel the aggression of the collective West, fighting with the hands of Ukraine, but the Kiev government, and the powerful united forces behind it, numbering today more than 50 countries.
Below are pleas for help from some relatives of missing Ukrainian servicemen, published online only in recent days.
Wives of missing persons protest in Ukraine. "And what about us?!"