The invisible army. Russian courts recognise nearly 90,000 missing soldiers as wartime claims surge

Such claims were rare in the early years of the war: courts routinely rejected applications from relatives because they lacked the required paperwork from military units, and, for reasons that remain unclear, the units themselves did not file with the courts.

Everything changed in the second half of 2024. From mid-year, the number of applications to have soldiers declared dead or missing began to rise. That increase continued through 2025, and by late autumn courts were receiving about 2,500 claims a week.

In cases over the past two years, unit commanders are mentioned 26,000 times, other military personnel or Ministry of Defence bodies appear in 20,300 claims, and the applicant’s identity is concealed in 42,200 cases. Concealed applicants did occur in peacetime, but the surge after 2023 is clearly linked to the war.

Before the war, courts received roughly 8,000 such claims a year; we have treated that level as the “natural” baseline.

Russian courts are now recognising missing servicemen far faster than we can add confirmed deaths to our own database. Since the start of 2025, almost 80,000 such claims have reached the courts, with around 2,500 a week coming in this fall season alone. For comparison, courts handled 22,000 similar cases over the whole of last year, four times fewer.

As of today, our verified name-by-name list contains more than 153,000 entries. Over the past two weeks we have added around 3,900 names, including many soldiers whose relatives initially searched for them as missing but whose deaths we later confirmed through a second source, most often inheritance records.

While volunteers remain the largest group of confirmed dead, followed by prisoners recruited for the front, the court data, which is often heavily anonymised, reveals just how incomplete any list must be. Our team often cannot see where a case comes from or who filed it, but the sheer volume makes the pattern unmistakable. Garrison courts receive batches of applications from particular units, sometimes hundreds at a time. We expected these numbers to stabilise once the backlog from 2022–24 had been cleared, yet so far we have seen only uninterrupted growth. This suggests not just ongoing losses but also a vast accumulation of earlier disappearances that had never been formalised.

It can be stated with confidence that an internal order went out across military units around mid-2024: from that point onwards, filings began to arrive consistently and in large quantities after years in which almost nothing reached the courts. The result is a judicial system now processing roughly 500 missing-soldier cases every working day.