You're reading: At least 53 people still missing after EuroMaidan Revolution

Two years after the EuroMaidan Revolution, volunteers and law enforcers are still looking for at least 53 people who went missing during the uprising, during which more than 100 anti-government protesters were killed.

One of the missing people is Sergiy Novitsky, his mother Iryna Savchenko said at a news conference in Kyiv on Feb.19.

She said her son, then 29, didn’t tell her he was going to join the EuroMaidan Revolution, so when she lost contact with him in February 2014 she started a campaign to search for him in their home town of Berdychiv in Zhytomyr Oblast, 200 kilometers west of Kyiv.

But then one of her son’s acquaintances told Savchenko that Novitsky had gone to Kyiv. The last time he was seen was on Feb. 20, 2014, near one of the tents put on Maidan Nezalezhnosti by the protesters. That was the day when the violence in Kyiv peaked and dozens of protesters were shot dead.

Since then, Savchenko has not heard from her son. His body was not among those who were killed in the Feb. 20 massacre of Institutska Street in central Kyiv.

She has been knocking on all possible doors – ministries, police departments – but “nobody knows anything, nobody is interested,” she says. Novitsky has two small children waiting for their father at home.

At a televised news conference, Savchenko showed her son’s photo and pleaded for those present to remember his face.

“Maybe he lost his memory and doesn’t know who he is. Send him (to us) – he lives in Berdychiv and everyone is waiting for him to come home,” she said.

This is just one of the many cases of people that went missing during EuroMaidan, and not even the most difficult, according to Roman Krylevych, head of Criminal Investigation Department at the Interior Ministry.

He said that for many of the 53 missing people nothing is known about them except for their last names, ages and descriptions of their appearance. Sometimes there is not even a contact person to find out more, or at least to check whether the missing person had in fact returned home.

Taras Matviiv, a coordinator of Maidan Search Initiative, says that during the EuroMaidan Revolution people didn’t trust the police (the militsia at that time), so if someone went missing they only informed EuroMaidan volunteers. Therefore, it took a lot of time and effort to put together a database of missing people.

Since February 2014, volunteers have received more than 1,000 requests from people looking for relatives and friends who participated in the protests with whom they have lost contact. Of these, 943 people were found alive, but 21 of them were discovered to have died.

Only six names of those found to be dead are included among the Heavenly Hundred, the list of protesters killed at EuroMaidan. The investigation couldn’t connect 15 other deaths to the EuroMaidan Revolution or prove that these people had been murdered.

Nadia Dugova, another coordinator with the Maidan Search Initiative, says that although they get help from the Interior Ministry’s Krylevych, this is insufficient. She demands that all 53 missing person cases be added to the investigation of the killings that took place during the EuroMaidan Revolution.

However, there is no guarantee that adding in those cases would speed up the process, as Ukraine’s investigation into the murders of activists during the EuroMaidan Revolution has been repeatedly criticized as slow, ineffective and not transparent.

However, head of the Special Investigations Unit of the Prosecutor General’s Office Serhiy Horbatyuk waved off these criticisms at a press conference in Kyiv on Feb. 18.

He said that law enforcement bodies have already sent to court 126 cases against 162 people charged with committing crimes during the EuroMaidan Revolution. The courts have found 26 people guilty of such crimes, Horbatyuk added.