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The Russian government expects the United States to help it locate more than 450,000 Russians who found themselves in the West after being freed by Allied troops from World War II German prison camps, said a top official Friday. The official is a spokesman for the joint U.S.-Russian commission to seek out missing persons from Cold War-era conflicts.
"They are now citizens of nations friendly to Russia," he said. "They would have been persecuted before, but we just want to know what happened to them because they are still considered missing and because many of them have relatives in Russia."
The commission, set up two years ago primarily to find out what happened to the hundreds of Americans declared missing in action during World War II, the Vietnam and Korean wars and Cold War spying operations, is now helping the Russian side seek out ex-Soviet soldiers declared missing during the Afghanistan invasion.
"We found out with the help of the American side that 19 of the 290 Soviet soldiers listed missing during the Afghan war now live in the United States, Canada, Germany and other Western nations," said the commission's Russian co-chair, Dmitry Volkogonov.
Volkogonov said other Russian soldiers probably live in Islamic nations after being captured by the Afghan rebels. "We do not blame them for anything and we want to find out what happened to them for purely humanitarian reasons."
Less progress has been made in determining what happened to Americans who disappeared during the Cold War and the Vietnam and Korean conflicts.
However, the American co-chair of the commission, Ambassador Malcolm Toon, said Friday that he had just received a call from a joint U.S.-Russian search party that had apparently found the remains of an American pilot shot down over the Kuril Islands in the Russian Far East.
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