There are 480 cases of missing persons registered by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), persons missing both in areas of Donbas controlled by Ukraine and in areas not controlled by Kyiv. Under the ICRC auspices, more than 500 missing people have been found during the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

At a briefing in Kyiv on Wednesday, ICRC official speaker Sanela Bajrambasic said it had launched an information campaign in Ukraine to attract people's attention to the work of the organization to search for missing persons as a result of the conflict in eastern Ukraine.

According to her, the purpose of a sort of educational action is to tell people that they can contact the offices of the ICRC with information on a missing person.

Bajrambasic said the ICRC is not directly engaged in search. She said it is the sole responsibility of the authorities and law enforcement agencies. She also said that the ICRC is working with both parties of the conflict, performing exclusively a humanitarian mission and acting in conditions of confidentiality.

"In Ukraine, as you know, there is no a general list of missing people now. Our task is to make sure as many people as possible, whose relatives are missing, to contact us ... So that we can create a list of people who have disappeared as a result of the conflict in Donbas, and after that we will be able to solve this problem," she said.

In turn, the ICRC head on the search for missing persons project, Fabien Bourdieu said that the Committee receives requests from people, processes the data and generates a list of missing people. It then sends it to the authorities of the territory in which the people disappeared.

Also, he said, the ICRC is providing psychological and material assistance.

"Today we have 480 active cases. These cases are being processed. They do not concern people who have already been found, but those whom we continue to look for," he said.

"They include both military and civilian persons. Of these cases, 97% of people are men, 55% are civilians," he said.

The head of the ICRC project on missing persons said that ICRC representatives are working on both sides of the demarcation line. They communicate with representatives of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics.

"All the information that we collect is confidential," he said. "As of today, nearly a thousand cases have been registered. More than 500 cases have been closed. These are the cases when the persons have been found," he said.