Soldiers of a Luhansk military unit go missing en masse
Relatives of Russian army soldiers who served in the Luhansk military unit 40463 report numerous cases of missing persons a few days after they started their service, the ASTRA Telegram channel reported. ASTRA provided 20 names of servicemen whose relatives had asked the administrators for help.
According to the channel’s administrators, some relatives claim that their men were sent to the 40463 unit as punishment. In the case of one man, it is written that he was transferred to 40463 for demanding a legal leave. It also refers to cases of sending wounded soldiers to storm Ukrainian positions, the command’s refusal to evacuate the wounded and dead, and the inability to contact the command for information.
Occupied managed to find several discussions on social media about such cases, which ASTRA wrote about. In these discussions, relatives of the missing soldiers of the 40463 military unit are also looking for at least the contacts of the unit and commanders, and complain about the lack of information about the fate of their husbands. According to the participants, they have lost contact with their relatives at the front and have stopped receiving payments related to them, such as salaries or alimony, without any notice or explanation.
“My husband serves in the military unit 40463 of the southern military district, he disappeared on 20 January 2024. The military unit has been silent for two months now in response to a request from the military enlistment office. The contract was signed on 7 December, but there have been no payments of remuneration (salary) to this day. And there is no information about the circumstances of his disappearance or whereabouts,” one woman wrote in a review under an old reference information about the Luhansk Prosecutor’s Office for Supervision of the Observance of Laws in the Military Sphere in the Southern Region of Ukraine.
The reference refers to a Ukrainian law enforcement agency that has not been operating in Luhansk, which has been occupied since 2014. However, the complaints in the reviews relate to the conditions of service in the Russian army, the oldest of which are from October 2022. People started complaining about military unit 40463 in November 2023, and now there are 22 complaints about it in the reviews. As in the ASTRA report, it is not only about missing persons, although there are more complaints about that, but also about sending wounded men to the front or not sending them for treatment.
The Voenchast website, which is positioned as a “military social network,” has reports from relatives of 51 missing soldiers from military unit 40463, all of them from 2024. According to the reports, the missing men fought in the Siversk direction – near Bakhmut and the villages of Spirne and Berestove near the administrative border of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions.
Relatives search for the missing from the 40463 also through the Russian social network VK. In a discussion, which began in August 2023 and continues to this day, several relatives wrote about disappearance of entire squads of soldiers. “My son has not been in touch since 18.07. The same military unit. I tried to find out in various ways what happened to him. From two places I received information that he was missing. From 23 to 24 July, in the vicinity of Bilohorivka. One source said that the entire unit was missing. I don’t know how this can be,” one man wrote.
From the VK discussion
The Telegram channel Don’t Wait for Me from Ukraine has published at least 35 posts from relatives looking for missing soldiers from the 40463 unit since 2023. “On 16.07.23, he went into battle in the area of Bilohorivka, LPR (wrote to his parents). He has been missing since 17.07.2023. We called his phone number on 20.08.2023, (someone) picked up the phone and said that the number was purchased in Grozny,” one of these posts said.
The majority of the disappeared whose origin is mentioned in the posts in the Don’t Wait for Me from Ukraine are local, Luhansk residents.
As can be seen from the messages on all social media, none of the relatives managed to contact the command of the 40463. The ASTRA Telegram channel, citing the wives of the missing, was able to provide only the call signs of three commanders and one name, a morale officer.
ASTRA noted that in April 2024, relatives of the missing soldiers of the 40463 military unit addressed a petition to the Russian President Vladimir Putin to clarify the fate of the men and to inspect the military unit. The petition referred to servicemen who went missing in the same area back in 2022. “Our attempts to find out anything about them on our own have been unsuccessful, and their commanders and superiors stubbornly refuse to get in touch with us. The unit does not make contact and does not provide information,” the relatives wrote.