A month after Nepal-China floods, families await answers about more than 50 missing Ukrainians

BANGKOK (AP) — Olena Kalynychenko was looking forward to sharing the chrysanthemum tea she had bought in China with her partner. “She said, ‘When I come back home, we will drink the tea made from Chinese flowers,’” said Oles Visich, Kalynychenko’s partner. He has now been waiting for news about her for a month, after she and thousands of others disappeared in catastrophic flooding along the Nepal-China border.

Her last known location was exiting China at a border post at 10:22 a.m. local time, 15 minutes before the flood. Kalynychenko, 36, was part of a group of 56 people, mostly Ukrainians, who had traveled to Mount Kailash in Tibet for a spiritual retreat.

Their families’ situation is a sign of how complex and time-consuming the process is of rescuing, recovering and identifying victims lost to the disaster. Given the number of missing, the process will likely take months. They disappeared while heading from China to Nepal on their way home.

Some relatives say they have received no information from authorities. The Chinese government has told at least two families that their relatives left Chinese territory before the flood struck, but they haven’t been able to confirm whether they entered Nepal as Nepal’s immigration complex and its records were destroyed in the floods. Little information is reaching families The floods killed more than 1,400 people and left more than 6,000 missing, most of them on the Nepali side of the border.

Nepal has said that 636 foreign nationals remain missing, including 54 Ukrainians. China has reported 261 foreign nationals among the missing on its side, including one Ukrainian. Families in Ukraine say most of them have not received any answers since realizing their relatives were among the missing.

“We only have the statistics that are being posted online — how many people have been found, how many are alive, how many are dead, and how many are still missing,” said Stanislav Solohub, whose brother and sister-in-law went missing on Aug. Nepal says it has recovered 1,451 bodies, but only 112 have been handed over to families so far. The government said it has collected DNA samples from 2,035 relatives so far, but it has not disclosed how many victims have been identified.