Tens of thousands of Russian families are still searching for relatives missing in the war in Ukraine. They send appeals to the Defense Ministry, wait for DNA results, and travel to Reception, Processing and Dispatch Center for the Dead No. 522 in Rostov-on-Don, where soldiers’ bodies are brought. According to BBC and Mediazona, Russia’s losses over three and a half years of war have exceeded 124,000 people, and in late 2024 Deputy Defense Minister Anna Tsivileva said the ministry had received 48,000 DNA testing requests from families of the missing.
One regular visitor to the Rostov morgue was Yekaterina Snigireva, a hairdresser from Rostov-on-Don. She says she began this work in late 2022 after meeting a woman outside a military hospital who was searching for her son. Later, relatives began sending her notarized powers of attorney so she could look for possible matches using descriptions of appearance, tattoos, teeth, and personal belongings.
“It is up to the relatives whether to sit and wait or to search,” Snigireva says, explaining that sending biological samples and comparing DNA can take from several months to a year.
At the morgue, relatives file documents, receive a pass to see an investigator, and fill out a search card with the missing person’s identifying features. According to Snigireva, the search procedure itself takes about two hours, and if there is no match, many families repeat it every month. She says that over two years she received about 300 powers of attorney and searched for the missing during each visit, arranging the timing with investigators in advance.
Snigireva also says she asked for small transfers to cover printed documents and transport, usually between 200 and 3,000 rubles, but did not consider that income and says she returned large payments. The remaining money, she says, went toward humanitarian aid and collections for Russian troops, for which she received several awards.
According to Snigireva, after a change in management in late 2024 she was first told to stand in the general queue and was later barred from entering the morgue altogether. She links this to objections from Colonel Marat Muradosilov, who concluded that she was making money from the searches. In response, relatives of 114 missing soldiers sent a collective letter to the head of the center asking that the volunteer be allowed to resume the work.
The Investigative Committee told Snigireva that under Article 193 of Russia’s Criminal Procedure Code, an investigator may present a body for identification only to a person who knew the deceased while alive. She argues that she was not conducting formal identification, only selecting bodies in the database that matched the descriptions provided by families. After the ban, Snigireva says, she struggled deeply because she had seen the practical results of her work.