Donetsk, Nov 2 - DAN. Remains of some 150 unidentified victims of the Donbass conflict have been exhumed from graves in the Donetsk People’s Republic, chairwoman of the DPR Commission on the search for missing persons, the Republic’s ombudswoman Darya Morozova said at an international round-table meeting “Donbass Nonhealing Wound” on Tuesday.

“The Donetsk People’s Republic has been searching for missing persons since the very beginning of the conflict in 2014,” the Lugansk Media Centre quoted Morozova as saying. “We’ve worked at some 25 locations retrieving 147 bodies; this includes the efforts of the commission (on the search for missing persons).”

Lugansk is hosting an international round- table meeting over the results of the search for missing persons in Donbass. It is attended by the heads of the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic, Denis Pushilin and Leonid Pasechnik, chairwoman of the DPR inter-departmental commission on the search for missing persons Darya Morozova, Lugansk People’s Republic First Deputy Foreign Minister, head of the LPR inter-departmental working group on the search for Ukrainian aggression victims burial sites Anna Soroka and other officials. A photographic exhibition arranged for the meeting showed the timeline of the search for mass graves in Donbass.

In the summer, the DPR and the LPR set up an inter-departmental commission and a working group to step up the search for missing persons. They include representatives of the Republics’ leadership, law-enforcement bodies and expert community. They were tasked with organizing the search for the missing persons, composing a register of the missing, gathering information on them, creating a database of the missing and deceased and their relatives and coordinating exhumation efforts, identification of bodies and handing them over to relatives.

In the DPR, the first remains were exhumed in Snezhnoye’s Ovsyanoe cemetery on August 19. The Commission then searched for burial sites in Debaltsevo. Experts are reportedly preparing to open a mass grave in Khartsyzsk. *jk