This may involve working with parties to the conflict to bring their fallen soldiers back home, helping family members reunite with their loved ones through cross-border passages, or facilitating repatriation operations for civilians.
Safe cross-border passages:
In our role as a neutral intermediary and following agreements between the parties, the ICRC facilitated the safe cross-border passage of more than 270 vulnerable adults from the territory controlled by one party to the conflict to that controlled by the other in 2024. The ICRC also helped several dozen children reunite with family members in Russia and in Ukraine.
Accounting for those in enemy hands:
Acting as a neutral intermediary between the parties to the conflict, the ICRC’s Central Tracing Agency Bureau collects, centralizes, safeguards and transmits information from one side to the other, on military personnel and civilians who have fallen in the hands of the enemy. This helps families learn the fate and whereabouts of their loved ones, who they have been separated from, have gone missing, and/or who have fallen in the hands of the adversary.
As of the end of January 2025, the ICRC has more than 46,200 cases of people still missing in relation to the international armed conflict. The majority of these cases relates to combatants. More than 12,000 families have been informed of the fate or whereabouts of a missing loved one. We have been able to exchange 11,500 personal messages directly between PoWs and their families.
Additionally, the CTA Bureau coordinates with ICRC delegations in Russia and Ukraine and the wider network of Red Cross and Red Crescent national societies to help families looking for their missing relatives.
The dead/forensics:
The ultimate goal of the ICRC’s forensics work is to help prevent people from going missing and to provide answers to families, so they know the fate of their loved ones. In this conflict, our role as a neutral observer is to monitor the process of handover and repatriation of deceased servicemen between the two sides, and share our expertise with the authorities.
Parties to the conflict must ensure that the deceased are treated with dignity. The dead must be handled respectfully and their remains must be properly managed. The remains of unknown individuals must be identified. International humanitarian law also requires searching for, collecting, and evacuating the dead, to help ensure that no one is unaccounted for.
The ICRC has taken part, as a neutral intermediary, in the repatriation of the remains of hundreds of fallen Ukrainian and Russian soldiers in coordination with relevant authorities on both sides.
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