More than 2 million soldiers remain missing in the Great Patriotic War

More than 2 million Soviet soldiers continue to be listed as missing during the Great Patriotic War, said Mikhail Myagkov, scientific director of the Russian Military Historical Society. In his opinion, it will take at least several decades to discover and identify the remains.

“Thanks to the efforts of search engines, there are fewer unknown soldiers, but given the “pace” of this work – the number of identified soldiers – clarifying the fates and reburial of the remains will take several more decades,” said Mr. Myagkov “RIA News”.

In the early 1990s, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation determined the total number of irretrievable losses of the Red Army during the Great Patriotic War at 8.6 million people. However, it is impossible to say exactly how many of them are missing in action, because most prisoners of war were also held under this status, Mr. Myagkov noted.

Since the creation of the Russian Military Historical Society, its search teams have found more than 11 thousand remains of Soviet soldiers, 800 have been identified. Mr. Myagkov hopes that artificial intelligence will speed up the process of identifying the dead.

Leonid Uvarchev