Illustrated by Daria Borodenko
“Since March 3, 2022, there has been no communication, electricity, water, or gas supply. We don’t know how she is.” “Dear friends, I beg you 🙏🙏🙏 to contact me if you know anything about this family.” “Russian soldiers took my husband by force.”
Svitlana Hordiienko, a 32-year-old from Cherkasy, and other volunteers process these and hundreds of similar messages from Ukrainians who come from different cities. For many years, she worked as a screenwriter and editor of High Society with Kateryna Osadcha, a TV show. This year, however, she planned to take a step towards her dream and record several songs at a recording studio, launch a short promo and apply for a job as a singer on a cruise ship on Friday, February 25. “I was singing the whole day on Wednesday, February 23,” Svitlana recalls.
On February 24, the war began. Instead of recording songs, she had to evacuate. As soon as Svitlana was safe, she started to fight her inner enemy: guilt. So, when Kateryna Osadcha offered to join the project to search for missing people, the woman happily agreed. “Katia is an influencer and a media person, so she gets various requests for evacuation, search for missing children, etc. There were especially many of the latter. That is why Katia and Emma Shymanovych, a public figure, created the Search for Missing Persons channel. That offer to join was a real lifesaver for me.“
In the first few hours of participation, Svitlana received 400 requests. The number of subscribers to the channel created to search for missing civilians quickly reached 13,000. As of April 1, the channel had 100K subscribers. Some people are looking for their family or friends, others check if they have seen someone.
The application sent to volunteers asks for the first and last name of a missing person, their date of birth, the locality where they disappeared, the circumstances of their disappearance, a photo, and the contact number of those who are looking for them. One post per one missing person. Most applications come from the Kyiv and Kharkiv Regions, and from Mariupol.
Now the team has a bot that accepts applications automatically, you only need to check whether all necessary information is available and whether any unnecessary information is submitted. “Sometimes people write an apartment or a private house number. We delete that so that looters don’t know where to go. We also make sure that the contact phone number is not Russian“.
Russians also send requests to search for their Ukrainian relatives or friends but the volunteers do not post them because they are not sure whether those people can be trusted. To find an application on the channel, you just need to type the first and last name of a missing Ukrainian.
“We have minimized personal contacts because it is really hard to process that huge number of messages,” Svitlana shares. “It is very hard to see photos of missing people where they are smiling, celebrating something, or traveling. Sometimes different people ask to find the same person, these stories touch us even more. Someone is significant to so many people.“
If a person is found, the team sends their application to the group once again, with the relevant remark. “I think people need to see that we do find missing persons. That gives them hope that their loved ones will also get in touch.“
Now, the team of 25 volunteers is creating a database of saved persons and lists of evacuees. They hope the bot will soon be able to accept applications, analyze the data and immediately answer: your loved one is evacuated, or in hospital, or wounded, etc.
The team still has a lot of work to do. As of March 31, the volunteers have received about 16,000 search applications and only a thousand reports of found people. But Svitlana already knows what she will do when all Ukrainians finally return home, and her phone does not beep with new desperate requests every minute. She will make her dream come true: “I will finally sing.”
Recorded on March 31, 2022.
Translated bу Oksana Biliavska
