The police are investigating 70,000 cases of missing persons, but this figure does not mean the number of bodies of Ukrainians with the enemy, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine said.

"We are currently investigating about 70,000 criminal proceedings on the facts of missing persons," Head of the Main Investigation Department of the National Police of Ukraine Maksym Tsutskiridze said on Wednesday during a conversation with journalists after the screening of the documentary "Return. Heroes on Shield."

According to him, this figure includes both military and civilians, as well as those with whom relatives lost contact in the occupied territories.

The head of the Main Investigation Department said the number of criminal proceedings does not mean the number of bodies of Ukrainian citizens who remain with the enemy. The Commissioner for Persons Missing in Special Circumstances Artur Dobroserdov, in turn, said that if we are talking directly about the register of missing persons, then it contains information about more than 3,200 bodies that are currently unidentified.

"We are talking about bodies, but we are also talking about remains," he said.

According to him, the register records precisely those bodies that cannot be visually identified and for the identification of which a full range of investigative actions are carried out.

Deputy Head of the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War Yuriy Yusov said in fact, during each exchange and return of prisoners of war and civilians, those who were missing in action also return home. "This is happening all the time... therefore, the open proceedings are a task to establish the fate of a defender or an illegally detained civilian," he said.

Deputy Director of the Donetsk Scientific Research Expert and Forensic Center of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Ruslan Abasov drew attention to the fact that among the 16,000 bodies in the electronic registry, 10,500 have a preliminary match. This figure includes both military and civilian. "The identification process is long. For this, it is necessary that the electronic registry contains DNA samples of relatives... or some things (of the deceased), or samples during life. In this way, we will be able to identify everyone," Abasov said.