Forensic experts and diplomats gathered in Baku this week for the fourth International Conference on Missing Persons, where a stark warning emerged: the world's capacity to identify the missing has outpaced the political will to do so. With global numbers of missing persons rising by 70% between 2019 and 2024, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the conference underscored a growing humanitarian crisis that spans continents.
In Ukraine alone, roughly 280,000 people are registered as missing as of September 2026, with an estimated 10,000 new cases added every month since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022. The scale of the challenge is immense, and the ICRC has described the situation as "staggering."
Political will versus forensic capacity
Luis Bernardo Fondebrider, an Argentine forensic anthropologist with 42 years of experience across 66 countries, told the conference that the pattern is consistent wherever he works. "In every country, I see the same pattern. The families want justice, want reparation, want memory, and want to know what happened," he said. He attributed the failure to act to a "lack of political will from the states."
Fondebrider was blunt about governmental pledges. "The speeches about the commitment of the states" were "just words," he said. "Today, there are almost no governments with the willingness to really investigate how it's happened with the missing and to ask for justice for the perpetrators."
Christian Rivier, head of the ICRC's Central Tracing Agency, cautioned against over-reliance on technology. "We don't need to be blindsided by the fact that technology helps us," he told Euronews. Processing the information it generates remained the central challenge, he added. According to Rivier, it required "the human capacity to understand the information, to make sense of it, to ensure that there is an investigative medical-legal process that follows processes that are efficient and that avoid misidentification."
Lord Brady, a member of the UK House of Lords who last visited Azerbaijan 16 years ago during the Karabakh conflict, noted the progress since then. "We've had so much progress in the last few years," he said, adding that technological advances had opened up possibilities that "simply couldn't have been done in the past."
Azerbaijan's ongoing search
As of 31 August, 4,010 Azerbaijani citizens remain registered as missing linked to the first and second Karabakh conflicts. Azerbaijan's State Commission says it has collected DNA samples from more than 11,000 donors to help identify more than 3,700 missing persons. Rizvan Nabiyev, a member of the State Commission, said cross-border information-sharing was essential for "confidence-building measures" and "trust between societies."
Iranian-French photojournalist Reza Deghati, who presented a collection documenting the human cost of the Karabakh war, said he had set out to understand who those 4,010 people were. The state, he said, had begun systematically collecting DNA from the relatives of the missing, "a list of all the families that are missing people."
Ukraine's colossal task
The challenge is most acute in Ukraine, where the ICRC described in September 2026 "a staggering 280,000 people registered as missing amid the Russia-Ukraine war." Former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko told Euronews that recovering the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers remained an enormous undertaking, describing it as "a colossal job."
Yushchenko said he did not expect Russia to provide information on those who remain unaccounted for. "In short, I am not sure that we will get such information from Russia, because it is Russia," he said.
The conference, held under the Baku Dialogue on Missing Persons, brought together government officials, forensic experts, and diplomats to discuss how countries can cooperate to identify the dead and locate those who disappeared in both historical and ongoing conflicts. As the numbers continue to climb, the message from Baku is clear: the tools exist, but the political resolve is lacking.
