Unnamed Russian soldier: 11 years

This week Russian officials reported the capture of an unnamed soldier who had deserted his post and gone to live in a remote forest in Kamchatka, in the country’s remote east, in 2004. Believing him dead, his family identified – and buried – another man’s body a few months after he went missing, having been drafted in 2003.

Hiroo Onoda: 29 years

The most famous of the Japanese imperial army holdouts after the second world war. Onoda obeyed an order to stay and fight after the US invasion of the Filipino island of Lubang in February 1945. Declared dead in 1959, he finally gave himself up in 1974, after his former commanding officer, by then a bookseller back in Japan, was brought back to the island and ordered him to surrender. He died in 2014.

Bakhretdin Khakimov/Sheikh Abdullah: 33 years

Red Army conscript Khakimov was wounded in action in 1980 fighting in Afghanistan. He was nursed back to health by locals before staying in the country, remarrying and adopting a local name. He was found in 2013 as part of a Russian army project to locate lost soldiers.

Shigeyuki Hashimoto and Kiyoaki Tanaka: 45 years

Hashimoto and Tanaka knew that Japan had lost the second world war, which they had been fighting in the Malaysian jungle. Instead of returning home, they took up arms with the Malaysian Communist guerrillas and fought with them until a peace accord was signed in late 1989. They returned to Japan aged 71 and 77 in 1990.