Frustrating and Often Fruitless: The Search for Missing Russian Soldiers Russian families searching for loved ones say the system for finding missing soldiers is as disorganized as Vladimir Putin’s military effort, which has been marked by dysfunction from the beginning.Ms. Chistyakova is among the hundreds of Russians engaged in a grass-roots effort to find missing sons, husbands, brothers and other loved ones who fought for Russia, a role that relatives and human rights advocates say was thrust upon them because the Ministry of Defense was woefully unprepared for the task.“No one in the ministry of defense expected such a scale,” he added, and hence it “simply did not create the appropriate services.” Russia has only announced casualty figures twice, in late March and in September, when the minister of defense, Sergei K. Shoigu, said that nearly 6,000 soldiers had died.The State of the War - Grain Deal: Russia rejoined an agreement allowing the shipment of Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea, one of the few areas of cooperation amid the war, easing uncertainty over the fate of a deal seen as crucial to preventing famine in other parts of the world.Joint military-civilian search teams have been established in seven conflict areas, Oleh Kotenko, a senior Ukrainian official appointed to organize the effort to track missing persons, told a news conference on Sept. 30."