Human rights defenders developed guidelines for relatives of captured servicemen
Human rights defenders from the NGO “Center for Civil Liberties” and the Human Rights Protection Group “SICH” have developed a cover instruction for the natives of relatives of captured servicemen of Ukrainian army.
If a member of your family is a serviceman and has been captured or has not been in touch for a long time, please follow the advice given in this guide. We provide step-by-step instructions on what to do and whom to contact.
What to do?
1. Registering the instance of captivity or disappearance. Please use the following hotlines:
- (Servicemen only) The United Center for POW Search and Release
+38 067 650 83 32; +38 098 087 36 01 united.centre.ssu@gmail.com - (Servicemen only) Contact the unit where the person serves and find out all the information, they have about your family member.
- The National Police Hotline for Finding Missing or Dead Persons 0 800 21 21 51 and 089 420 1867
- National Information Bureau under the Ministry for Reintegration 1648 and 0442878165
- Commissioner for Human Rights: 0800501720
- The OHCHR’s Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine ohchr-hrmmu@un.org Telegram: ohchr_hrmmu (messages only) Viber: +380503746708 (messages only)
- International Committee of the Red Cross: Hotline 0800300155 Search service 0963044375, 0662509957
How to make sure that your family member is on the POW list?
1. Please contact the Security Service of Ukraine in person, presenting a document certifying your identity and a document evidencing your relationship with the missing person (marriage certificate, birth certificate, etc.). You may apply to the oblast unit or, preferably, to the Main SSU Unit in Kyiv (33 Volodymyrska St.).
At the checkpoint, the duty investigator will meet you and take your application in the public reception room. Otherwise, a pass will be issued to you, and you will be escorted to the investigator’s office.
The investigator must be provided with all available information and evidence of your family member’s captivity. You should also provide the following (if any): the phone number from which your family member called during captivity, the frame-by-frame screen capture of the video in which he/she was seen, screenshots of posts in Telegram chats, etc.
After that, a letter of non-disclosure and an interview report will be signed between you (the applicant) and the SSU.
You will be provided with the case number and contact data of the investigator assigned to it.
This is a guarantee that the captivity will be confirmed.
If no documents evidencing kinship are available, you should apply to the court for establishing kinship and bring witnesses who can confirm that the applicant and the missing person/POW lived together or were married.
Information about establishing the fact of living as one family without being married is available at https://wiki.legalaid.gov.ua/index.php/Встановлення_факту_проживання_однією_сім’єю_чоловіка_та_жінки_без_шлюбу?
2. After the application has been filed and the case has been opened, you will be provided with the criminal proceedings number and meet the investigator who will work on the case. You should obtain the investigator’s contact data so that if any new information appears, you would be able to communicate it to the investigator immediately and monitor the progress of the case.
3. Using the help of a lawyer, contact the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) with a request for humanitarian aid or establishing communication with the captured family member.
The Ukrainian version of the ICRC website with contact data in Ukraine is available at https://blogs.icrc.org/ua/contacts/
The English version of the ICRC website with contact data of the Geneva Headquarters is available at https://www.icrc.org/en/contact
We recommend that you put your request on paper and send it to the Geneva Headquarters from a European country.
If the status and whereabouts of your family member are unknown:
1. Apply to the nearest police station with a report stating that communication with your family member has been lost.
After the report has been filed, you will be issued a document indicating the criminal proceedings number in the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations.
2. If you are a family member (father, mother, child), submit your DNA for a DNA test (the police will provide you with all the necessary information).
If the DNA cannot be obtained, a petition should be filed with the court for exhuming the parents’ or children’s bodies in order to extract the genome of the deceased for a DNA test.
After that, you will have to wait to see if there is a match. A partial match is not regarded as confirmation.
Besides, the missing person’s belongings may be seized to extract DNA traces.
After taking all the above steps, you should contact the Commissioner for Persons Missing Under Special Circumstances. The search process would be then initiated by this Service.
Contact phones: 0800339247 and 0958960421
IMPORTANT: Never pay for any services at any of these steps. Any offers of services for a fee mostly come from crooks.
This manual is also available in PDF.
