A daring trek through no-man’s-land to find a Jewish soldier gone missing

Photos: Jake Turx, Branden Eastwood, Serxan Medetli

They never heard from him again.

Three decades have passed since Vugar Mikhailov bid goodbye to his family and went to join his unit on the front.

Two wars and three decades later, his family still hasn’t given up hope

By Jake Turx, Azerbaijan

HE left his family’s doorstep on a crisp winter morning in 1993, a quiet, Jewish 19-year-old boy from the Azerbaijani town of Goychay. His mother begged him to stay. His brother offered to buy him a plane ticket out. The draft board had turned him away. But Vugar Mikhailov refused to listen.

“My country needs me,” he told them. And with a small bag slung over his shoulder, he disappeared down the dirt road, off to rejoin his unit fighting in Karabakh’s frozen hills.

What followed wasn’t death. It wasn’t life either. It was something far more unbearable:

Nothing.

No word.

No grave.

Just whispers — sightings, secondhand rumors, a scattered trail that faded as quickly as it appeared. A witness who claimed to have seen him in captivity. A rumor he was forced into slave labor. A file, a photo, silence.

For more than thirty years, his family has waited in limbo.

Hoping.

Wondering.

In 2023, with the battle lines redrawn and the dust of war barely settled, I returned to the hills and hollowed villages where Vugar’s trail went cold. As I pushed further into Karabakh — the minefields, the rubble, the ghost towns still smoldering from war — I’d discover that harder than losing someone is not knowing if they’re lost at all.

CHAPTER ONE

Where Time Stands Still

Kiryat Bialik, Israel: August 23, 2023

I meet the Mikhailov family in Vugar’s mother’s modest home in Kiryat Bialik, a quiet suburb near Akko, in August 2023. Vugar’s mother sits on the couch, dressed in a patterned black-and-white housedress and colorful headscarf, her hands resting gently in her lap, her eyes betraying years of tears. The rest of the family stands or sits quietly against the side wall.

A simple gray couch is pressed against one white plastered wall; a pair of wedding photos hangs on another. On the lace-covered table, alongside a tray of fruit and water bottles, I notice a pack of disinfectant wipes and a bottle of hand sanitizer — relics of Covid. And between the fruit bowl and scattered remote controls, a small, square-framed black-and-white photo catches my eye. It’s Vugar.

I look at this boy, frozen in time, decades younger than the grief that now filled the room. His gaze is steady, almost shy; suddenly the weight of the years, wars and borders separating us from him feels even heavier.

“How did you hear about my son after all these years?” Vugar’s mother asks, her voice a mix of curiosity, gratitude, and tentative hope. She speaks a blend of Russian and Azerbaijani, while Ilgar, Vugar’s tall and wiry older brother, who is fluent in Hebrew, tries to bridge the conversation between his mother’s Azerbaijani — a language he speaks well — and my English — a language he doesn’t. Conversations flow like a multilingual chess match — Russian to Hebrew to Azerbaijani to English and back again, leaving the poor translators — Vugar’s brother-in-law with the assistance of his wife — dizzy. But despite the linguistic hurdles, there’s no mistaking the emotions threading through the room.