Owen Warner reports in Medium:
Ukraine's Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, “I Want to Live” website has received more than 50 million visits, with 43 million coming from Russia. In July 2026 it had received 200,084 inquiries from Russian families searching for servicemen who disappeared during the war and identified 4,023 Russian servicemen who were being held captive in Ukraine. Of those, 2,696 had already been exchanged for Ukrainian defenders. In late 2025, the Russian courts had received over 90,000 claims relating to missing soldiers.
By June 2026, the Ukrainian government’s “I Want to Find” project had received 200,084 inquiries from Russian families searching for servicemen who disappeared during the war.
This was officially reported by the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, a government body which works on the project.
The Coordination Headquarters issued an important warning.
The figure of 200,084 is lower than the total number of missing Russian soldiers as not all Russian families are aware of the Ukrainian project or have contacted it.
“I Want to Find” is not just a website where someone enters the name of a soldier and receives a death certificate.
The project aims to help Russian families figure out what happened to the servicemen who disappeared during the war.
There is a possibility that one soldier may be missing.
He may have been killed.
He might have been taken prisoner.
His remains may have been recovered and identified.
Or he might have returned to Russia via a prisoner exchange.
According to Andriy Yusov, Deputy Head of Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, the “I Want to Live” website has received more than 50 million visits, with approximately 43 million coming from Russia.
Yusov said this demonstrates the exceptionally high level of interest among the project’s intended audience. The initiative has received more than 53,000 applications and has contributed to more than 400 successful cases involving people who surrendered, were captured, or joined the project with the intention of fighting alongside Ukraine’s security and defense forces.
— Andriy Yusov
That distinction is important because the figure of 200,084 cannot be considered a death toll.
But another number makes the situation even more interesting.
The Coordination Headquarters stated in July 2026 that it had identified 4,023 Russian servicemen who were being held captive in Ukraine.
Of those, 2,696 had already been exchanged for Ukrainian defenders.
So thousands of families who once had no idea where their relatives were eventually got an answer.
The answer was not necessarily the one they wanted.
But at least it was an answer.
The Ukrainian project is not the only example of families who are having trouble finding their missing soldiers in Russia.
The New Yorker covered the Russians’ search for missing servicemen using Google Maps reviews in February 2026.
They were sending messages on the pages of the Russian military facilities asking if their family members had been admitted.
One woman posted a plea on the Google Maps page of Military Hospital 1602 in the Russian town of Rostov-on-Don, asking if it had received a soldier who had gone missing months ago.
Other families did the same.
The reviews included names, dates of birth, call signs and other identifying details.
The hospital, according to the report, had not responded to those public appeals.
Think about how bizarre that is.
Google Maps was designed to answer questions such as:
Is this restaurant open?
Russian families were using it to ask:
Did my son die here?
There is another number that deserves attention.
In late 2025, the Russian courts had received over 90,000 claims relating to missing soldiers.
The number of new cases per week reportedly reached as high as 2,000 in December.
Then there is a family issue that the government has to resolve.
That is because one soldier is missing and that is a nightmare of paperwork.
The family can then be caught between two worlds until the state makes its determination.
The soldier is gone.
But officially, he may not be gone enough.
There is another striking detail in the latest Ukrainian data.
When “I Want to Find” contacts relatives, the project asks them if they are in favor of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Of those who responded in June 2026, only 18% said they supported the invasion.
According to the Coordination Headquarters, that was the lowest level recorded since it began collecting the data.
The figure had been between 25% and 30% during 2025 before beginning to decline.
But this is not to say that 82% of these families have suddenly become anti-Kremlin activists.
And it would be a mistake to say that.
A person can oppose a war because their family member disappeared without becoming politically active.
A mother doesn’t need to become a dissident to ask where her son is.
A wife doesn’t need to support Ukraine to be furious that nobody can tell her whether her husband is alive.
That is precisely why the number is interesting.
The war is reaching families through something much harder to dismiss than a television broadcast.
Someone they know is missing.
There is another figure circulating alongside all of this that needs to be handled carefully.
Russian losses are estimated in very different ways.
Ukraine publishes its own battlefield-loss estimates.
Independent Russian researchers, journalists and volunteers have separately built named lists of Russian military deaths.
The Coordination Headquarters says the 200,084 inquiries already represent an underestimate.
That makes sense.
Not every Russian family knows that “I Want to Find” exists.
Some may have already received information from Russian authorities.
Others may simply have stopped searching.
And some may still be searching through completely different channels.
So there is no honest way to turn 200,084 inquiries into a precise number of Russian soldiers who are dead or missing.
But there is also no reason to dismiss the figure.
Yet thousands of Russian families are now turning to Ukraine for information about Russian soldiers.
The Ukrainian government is continuing a project geared towards answering questions from those families.
That project alone had identified over 4,000 Russians being held captive in Ukraine, of whom almost 2,700 had been exchanged.
Meanwhile, some Russian families have been searching Google Maps.
Maybe the more significant figure is the number of families who are still asking the same question after the databases, courts, hospitals, military offices and prisoner lists have been searched.
A soldier can disappear twice in a war of this magnitude.
First from the battlefield.
Then from the paperwork.
And when that happens, the family is left trying to find him in the one place nobody expected.
Across the border, in the records of the enemy.
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