SLOVIANSK, Ukraine -- Peering out over the faded fence in front of her modest cottage, Maria Vasylovna Pichko wonders if her son is "somewhere out there."
"In my heart I believe he is," says the 61-year-old, wiping tears from her eyes.
It’s been almost eight months since she last saw her 31-year-old son Alexei Borisovich Pichko. Pro-Russian rebel gunmen came one day last June and dragged him off. She hasn't seen him since.
Hundreds, possibly thousands of people have gone missing in eastern Ukraine in the course of this conflict, swallowed up by war as it washed over this sprawling godforsaken Eastern European steppe. The government in Kiev has no idea just how many people have vanished, activists say. Mashable inquiries went unanswered.
On Thursday, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry reported dozens of soldiers had gone missing in action.
Over 90 Ukrainian troops taken hostage by rebels in #Debaltseve, 82 troops MIA; 13 killed & 157 wounded when fleeing town, says military.— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) February 19, 2015
Ekaterina Sergatskova, a Ukrainian journalist and leader of a campaign to document the cases of the disappeared, says tracking missing persons cases has become "impossible." She puts the figure somewhere in the thousands.
Some of them are likely to be among the scores of bodies piling up in morgues and being exhumed from mass graves. In Sloviansk, local authorities continue to find burial sites from when the city was under rebel control last summer.
At Cherevkovka cemetery, the groundskeeper Igor runs his finger down the pages of his book of burial plots. The number of unidentified bodies "would take forever to count," he says, strolling past dozens of fresh graves dusted with virgin snow and marked with new wooden crosses.
Most of them have no names, only "unknown male" with an age range. Igor doesn't think they'll ever be identified.
"Nobody is looking for them," he says.
One of these graves could hold Alexei.
Documents recovered by Mashable last July from the office of Igor "Strelkov" Girkin, the Russian warlord who controlled this eastern Ukrainian city last summer, showed Maria's son had been convicted by a rebel military tribunal of "looting" and that the punishment was "execution by firing squad."
Among the documents was Pichko's handwritten confession, in which he pleaded to be sent to the front lines of the war to redeem himself.
"I want to die as someone who was of use to the DNR," he wrote, referring to the separatists' self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic. "I also have a pregnant wife, Rydkovskaya Inna Vladimirovna… I want to see her and nurse the children and be a useful member of society."
That was the last anyone heard of Alexei.
Maria says she was called to come and look at a body exhumed just before New Year in Sloviansk. She scanned it for moles and other identifying marks but found nothing familiar.
Investigators took DNA from her and the body for testing in Kiev before burying it at Cherivkovka.
She hasn't gotten an answer yet.
So Maria keeps her eyes on the horizon.
"There is still a chance" her son is alive, she says.
"I wait for him every day."