U.S.–Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIAs

The U.S. - Russia Joint Commission on POWs/MIAs (USRJC) was established in 1992 by the presidents of the United States and the Russian Federation, George H. W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin. The USRJC was established to determine the fates of the United States's and the Soviet Union's unaccounted-for service personnel from World War II, the Korean War, the Cold War (as defined by the USRJC's directive to be specific "reconnaissance missions"), Afghanistan and the Vietnam War, Laos and Cambodia.

Information exchanged between the two parties is then investigated by a spectrum of governmental entities. In the U.S., the Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) is the lead agency responsible for personnel accounting and personnel recovery. Numerous sub-agencies and offices are then tasked with further analysis and investigation, both in the US and abroad. The Russian side has established a similar hierarchy of agencies for reporting and vetting information. As of June 2007, the Russian side has yet to formalize certain elements and access within its own Prisoner of War - Missing in Action or Killed in Action but Body Not Recovered program (Interagency Commission for Prisoners of War, Internees, and Missing in Action).

The USRJC is broken down into four Working Groups which correlate to the four main areas of investigation. There is the World War II Working Group, the Korean War Working Group, the Cold War Working Group and finally, the Vietnam War Working Group,...
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