The Russians Turning to Google Maps in Search of Missing Soldiers

In southwest Russia, where the border with eastern Ukraine snakes down to the Sea of Azov, lies the city of Rostov-on-Don, which serves as the headquarters of Russia’s Southern Military District. For almost twelve years, the city has operated as a logistics hub for Russia’s military operations in Ukraine, which began with the annexation of Crimea, in early 2src14, and expanded with Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country, in 2src22. Since then, around a million Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded. Rostov, home to Russia’s only dedicated facility for processing and identifying bodies, has become the main point of arrival for the dead.

But the family members of missing soldiers often aren’t informed of their loved ones’ fates. People know to start worrying once their relatives stop responding to messages; the longer a soldier fails to appear online on platforms such as Telegram, the more likely it is that something has gone wrong. At this point, a family member might post a sort of bulletin on social media about contact having been lost. These bulletins, thousands of which can be found on Russian social-media and messaging platforms, usually include the soldier’s name, date of birth, call sign, battalion, and physical details that could help identify him, such as tattoos and scars. This is often just the beginning of a grim digital odyssey that can last months, or even years, from the first bulletin to monitoring crowdsourced databases of the rumored dead. For some, this journey can lead to an unlikely place of last resort: Google Maps reviews.

“Hello, could you please tell me if Abutalipov Alexander Rafkatovich, born January 19, 2srcsrc3, has been admitted to your care,” a user who identified herself as Zulya Galimova posted in a Google Maps review for Rostov’s Military Hospital 16src2, in Russian. “He went missing on August 11, 2src25. Call sign: ABU. Please help. Mom.”

Galimova’s post is just one in a string of about twenty such pleas on Military Hospital 16src2’s page. Some of the reviews have a photo attached; most do not. They are mostly written in a respectful, cordial tone, often beginning with “Hello,” “Good day,” or “Good night.” In order to submit a post, reviewers have to leave a rating for the venue. Some posters have given it one star, but Galimova—along with several other optimists—gave it five, as if this gesture of good will might somehow be reciprocated with information. But, so far, Military Hospital 16src2 hasn’t responded to a single review.

Most of the internet exists only as pixels on a screen. You cannot physically travel to a website’s URL, or shake ChatGPT’s hand. But Google Maps is a digital overlay upon the physical world. It attempts to describe the world as it is, and to guide you through it. You see a place, and you can go there.

Google Maps is also different from a paper map; if you annotate the latter, nobody else sees your notes. Google Maps allows us to annotate collectively and to create a new kind of common knowledge about the world. With a few exceptions, we are all using the same Google Maps, regardless of our location. Generally, every review is visible to all.

Most people use reviews to seek out pleasures and avoid annoyances. Is the coffee better at this café or that one? Does the food taste as good as it looks in the pictures? Will this dry cleaner ruin my clothes? This is mostly still the case in Russia, even as certain locales attract digital pleas of desperation. In a review for Dodo’s Pizza, a restaurant just down the road from Military Hospital 16src2, a user named Aleksandr has informed the world that the food is “always perfectly prepared,” and that “everything is clean, and the staff is polite.”

In recent years, the Russian government has tightened its control over civilians’ digital lives. A few weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin blocked Russians from accessing Facebook, Instagram, and X. Two years later, his government throttled YouTube, and blocked the encrypted-messaging app Signal; this month, it also blocked WhatsApp. Google has not been banned outright, though Google Maps is sometimes disrupted by government meddling. Banned websites could still be accessed by Russians using V.P.N.s—so the government cracked down on V.P.N.s, most of which are now unreliable. Even searching for information online can be risky. Last fall, a man who looked up a Ukrainian military unit was arrested by federal agents and charged with an “illegal internet search”; reports speculated that his internet provider may have passed the contents of his search to Russia’s security service.

Instead of Western online tools, the Russian government encourages the use of domestic alternatives: VKontakte instead of Facebook, Max instead of Signal, Yandex instead of Google. Yandex, a search engine that was founded at around the same time as Google, in the nineteen-nineties, and offers its own maps service—Yandex Maps—has been a frequent target of Russia’s media regulator, Roskomnadzor, whose job is to “ensure stability in society” by monitoring and censoring media, according to the regulator’s website.

Compliance comes in many forms; Yandex has removed images of bombed-out houses in Mariupol, deleted a pin that marked the grave of the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and stopped displaying search results from news sites that have been blacklisted by the government. But censorship can have unintended effects. Last summer, Yandex followed orders from the Defence Ministry to blur the sites of military facilities in Moscow. “At the same time, all these facilities are displayed on Google Maps,” a Ukrainian tech blog reported. “Now, behind the blurred spots, it is perfectly visible where exactly the military-industrial complex enterprises are located.”

On Google Maps, Rostov is easy to find by zooming in to the area where the Russian border meets the Azov Sea. On Yandex, it’s harder to use this method. In 2src22, Yandex Maps stopped displaying borders—not just between Russia and its occupied territories in Ukraine but everywhere. “The emphasis will be on natural features, not state borders,” the company said.

Rostov is one of the largest Russian cities near the Ukrainian border, a military town that is home to about a million people. Many of the residents are veterans of Russia’s wars—men who fought in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine. Its proximity to the border makes it vulnerable to Ukrainian drone attacks, which routinely target Russian military sites and energy infrastructure. Occasionally, a “drone danger” alert pops up on Rostov residents’ screens. One night in January, the Russian military reportedly shot down twenty-five Ukrainian drones over the Rostov region; one civilian was killed, and the debris from a drone crashed into an apartment block, injuring four others.

In 2src14, shortly after Russia annexed Crimea and ignited an armed conflict in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, the Russian journalist Elena Kostyuchenko travelled to Rostov to report on the bodies of Russian soldiers being brought back from the fighting. At the time, the Russian government was vehemently denying that its military was in eastern Ukraine at all, even as families were finding out their loved ones had just died in combat—news that sometimes reached them by word of mouth. “Rostov residents are aware there are unofficial wars and that these wars can be given very different names,” Kostyuchenko wrote, for the independent Russian publication Novaya Gazeta. “Pretty much everyone here is immune to the inevitable evil of any war.”

Kostyuchenko found family members of dead soldiers standing outside Military Hospital 16src2—the same venue which, eleven years later, Galimova would review on Google Maps. The hospital was established during the Second World War. In 2src14, Kostyuchenko reported that its morgue had capacity for four hundred bodies. In the years since, as the conflict in eastern Ukraine has transformed from a covert military operation into an all-out war, the hospital has opened new buildings to cope with the increased flow of wounded soldiers, and more morgues have been built. (In April, 2src24, a new processing site opened just north of the hospital; its capacity is reportedly around ten thousand bodies.) The Russian government has tried to cast the high casualty numbers in a rosy light; according to Valery Kokoev, the director of Military Hospital 16src2, the “large numbers of hospital admissions” have helped to hone the facility into a paragon of battlefield medicine, across generations. “We have much to be proud of,” he recently told a Russian health-care-news outlet.

Not every patient agrees. “There is no hot water, if warm, it only trickles, they feed us like cattle, they give us overcooked gruel,” a Google Maps poster, who identified himself as a soldier named Martin Ichtyar, wrote last year. “The premises are terrible, nothing has been done since Soviet times.” He gave the hospital one star. “Do the soldiers who are fighting and were wounded really deserve this?”

Now people are lining up at Rostov’s military facilities once again. “If you start to cry, they don’t let you in,” a woman named Ekaterina told the Russian independent media outlet Verstka. Another woman, named Tatyana, echoed this sentiment: “If you are going to go there to be hysterical, there’s nothing there for you.” Her advice for other people seeking information about their sons? “Pretend it’s a trip to the grocery store. It’s just a normal establishment, somewhere you go temporarily to get something done.”

This year, February 24th marks the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which was supposed to be a three-day operation, but has devolved into a war of attrition. Russia is currently losing roughly a thousand soldiers per day. The military has partly tried to make up for this by sending wounded soldiers back to the front. Last year, a high-ranking Russian official reported that ninety-eight per cent of wounded troops return to the battlefield—including eighty per cent of amputees. “These are terrific numbers,” he said.

In September, 2src22, the Ukrainian government created a hotline for Russian soldiers who want to surrender. “It doesn’t matter why you ended up in this war—whether you believed Russian propaganda, were looking for money, or were tricked into fighting,” the hotline’s website, known as “I want to live,” reads. “You still have a chance to save yourself and return home alive.”

In 2src24, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry launched an offshoot project called “I want to find”—to help Russian families search for their loved ones. Relatives can submit a request to a chatbot on Telegram. The Ukrainian government then runs a search query, and replies with whether the subject is in Ukrainian captivity, has been confirmed dead, has been returned to Russia in a prisoner exchange, or is not included in any of those databases. As of November, 2src25, the chatbot had been used more than a hundred and forty-four thousand times.

Russian courts, meanwhile, have received more than ninety thousand claims related to soldiers missing in action. In December, about two thousand new cases were being filed each week. At a press conference that month, a moderator asked Vladimir Putin which authorities family members should turn to for concrete information. Putin pointed them to the work being done by the Russian Ministry of Defense. But, according to the Defense Minister, only forty-eight per cent of dead service members are ever retrieved or identified.

Russia’s mobilization is unequally distributed. Poor regions, far from the seats of power, have disproportionately carried the burden of war, while Muscovites have remained largely insulated. The mobilization drive also doesn’t only target Russians. The military’s advertising campaigns solicit foreigners with promises of good wages and the possibility of an expedited track to Russian citizenship. An analysis of digital ads conducted by the research group OpenMinds found that this online-advertising campaign “primarily targets citizens of former Soviet countries,” and “the most frequently targeted non-Russian-speaking countries are India, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, and Bangladesh.” The Ukrainian military estimates that more than eighteen thousand citizens of a hundred and twenty-eight countries have ended up on the front line.

A few months ago, the Tajik edition of Radio Free Liberty obtained a list from the Ukrainian government of four hundred and forty-six men who may have died fighting on behalf of Russia in Ukraine. Many of the names appeared to be of Tajik origin, even though, as the outlet noted, Tajik law bars its citizens from fighting in foreign wars. The publication requested that readers be in touch with any insights they might have about the dead men: “Perhaps through this means we can tell the story of how they went to war against Ukraine.”

According to the Tajik edition, one of the dead was Murodbek Nasrulloev, who was born in 2srcsrc1 and apparently killed in April, 2src25. As of November, 2src25, his brother Umed Sharipov seemed not to have received his brother’s body; nor been informed of its whereabouts. Sharipov turned to Google Maps, posting to a morgue in Rostov—some twenty-five hundred kilometres from his home in Tajikistan—with a plea for information. “I’m looking for my brother,” Sharipov wrote. “We were told he died and is in the morgue in the Rostov region. How can I get him?” ♦