KHERSON, Ukraine (Reuters) – Clutching aid she’d received at a crowded humanitarian distribution point in Ukraine’s liberated city of Kherson, Anna Voskoboinik, a one-legged woman in a wheelchair, finds it hard to imagine life without her only son.Russian forces, she said, arrested Oleksii, 38, a former soldier, three months ago at a checkpoint and never released him before they pulled back from the right bank of the Dnipro River after occupying the city for almost nine months.
“Where is he now? I don’t know. I would go to the end of the world to find out. He’s my only son. He was always nearby. Now…” she said, tearing up.In the chaos of a retaken city with no power, running water or proper mobile signal and where the thud of artillery fire still sounds, attention is turning to hundreds of people thought to be in Russian custody or unaccounted for.They include people like Voskoboinik’s son, whose whereabouts are a mystery, and residents who were arrested by Russian forces during the occupation and taken farther away.
Authorities say it is impossible to estimate their numbers in a vast liberated area where communications are patchy, mines are a threat and fighting still rages with Russian troops across the river.”There’s a really big problem with communication, especially in rural places,” said Volodymyr Zhdanov, the regional Kherson administration’s point person for missing people.Russia regards Kherson as its territory and subject to its laws after it staged a “referendum” that was condemned as an illegitimate farce by Kyiv and the West.Ukraine has registered cases of abduction or disappearance of more than 900 people in Kherson region since the war began, the regional prosecutor’s office said. Those include local politicians, priests and regular citizens.Of that total, 480 people were released, but 379 remain in Russian custody, the prosecutor’s spokeswoman Anastasia Vesilovskaya said. Almost 400 civilians have been killed in unspecified Russian war crimes in the region, she added.