A boy was hit by a landmine at the beach. A young mother was shot in the forehead. A retired teacher is killed in her home. Hundreds of soldiers kill and die every day. The old and the young and everyone in between.
A war can be measured by many metrics. Territory win or lose. Geopolitical influence increases or decreases. Treasure acquired or resources exhausted. But for those under the shelling, who heard the screeching of incoming rockets, the gunshots in the streets and the mourning for loss from broken windows, the death toll is a story worth telling. tell about a war.
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In Ukraine, no one is sure exactly what that number is, except for many people who have been killed.
Petro Andryushchenko, an official of the devastated city of Mariupol, said “an endless convoy of death”.
In its latest updates, Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said 4,509 civilians were killed in the conflict. But apparently thousands more were killed. Ukraine’s police chief, Ihor Klymenko, said last week that prosecutors had opened criminal proceedings “for the deaths of more than 12,000 people found, in particular, in mass graves.”
And in Mariupol, the Black Sea city razed by Russian bombardment, Ukrainian officials in exile say the examination of mass graves has been made using satellite images, witness statements and other evidence. led them to believe that at least 22,000 people were killed – and possibly thousands more.
The casualty figures do not include the thousands of people believed to have been killed in territories held by Russian forces. And even if Ukraine does regain control, Klymenko said, it’s still too early to calculate the dead in mass graves, as more dead are found each week.
Indeed, finding and identifying the dead is a difficult challenge, the chief prosecutor of Ukraine said in a statement on Saturday, that it requires global coordination beyond Ukraine’s national efforts. The prosecutor, Iryna Venediktova, said she had met with the International Commission on Missing Persons, based in The Hague, to develop pathways for cooperation.
The Ukrainian and international authorities have little access to crowded cities to accurately calculate, and urban targets, constant artillery fire, and the static nature of the fighting in the south and The disputed east only adds to the death and terror.
“People are killed indiscriminately or suddenly or without rhyme,” said Richard H. Kohn, professor emeritus of history and peace, war and defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. or reason. He said the non-stop artillery “kills and kills people.”
“It creates a lot of psychological stress for the people, as well as for the fighters,” said Mr. Kohn, and “it lasted for a very long time.”
The Russians, eager to maintain an aura of competence, underreported their battlefield losses. Ukrainians, desperate to maintain morale as bullets fell, did the same. Civilian casualties are an unknown variable, multiplied by macabre factors like collapsing buildings and unreported victims of occupied towns.
Children are not protected from indiscriminate violence. The United Nations Office for the Protection of Children in Emergencies estimates that at least three children have died every day since the war began in February. That’s just an estimate.
Mariupol – the city that has become a symbol of the Ukrainian resistance, incessant Russian shelling and the brutality of war – is still burying corpses.
“In our city, there are a lot of mass graves, a lot of spontaneous graves, and some bodies are still lying on the streets,” Mariupol mayor Vadym Boichenko said last Monday.
That number adds to the horror of the damage to the 20% of Ukraine currently occupied by Russia. Some places, like Sievierodonetsk, were essentially reduced to rubble by the advancing Russian forces.
Early in the war, when Russia tried to capture the capital, Kyiv, but failed, its forces increased the death toll with astonishing brutality. In Bucha, they shot and killed civilians in their cars, homes and gardens, dumped their bodies on the streets, and even burned them and dumped them in parking lots. And when the Russian armored columns withdrew, they lost more lives.
According to Klymenko, at least 1,500 civilians were killed in the Kyiv area. They include two sisters in Bucha – a retired teacher and a disabled person.
“Why would you kill a grandma?” Serhiy, a neighbor of the sisters, asked.
Ukrainian troops are receiving heavy losses. According to government estimates, about 200 soldiers die every day. In towns and cities across the country, even those far from the front lines, military funerals take place almost daily for the Ukrainian soldiers killed in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, where fighting has become increasingly popular. the heaviest.
The dead are usually buried quickly, and in shallow graves.
“I feel numb,” said Antoniy, a morgue worker in Lviv, western Ukraine. “Even when someone is telling me a joke that I know is funny, I cannot laugh.”
Regardless of when or how war ends, Professor Kohn said, grief, loss, displacement and fear all become “part of a nation’s culture”.
Many Russians ordered by President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine under the pretext of liberating the country from Nazi Germany also did not return home. In April, Western countries estimated that Russia had lost about 15,000 troops in Ukraine; on Friday, Ukraine gave an estimate of 33,000.
The actual number is unknown, and won’t come from Moscow: Their last announcement, on March 25, said a total of 1,351 Russian soldiers had been killed.
In the months after the invasion began, local news websites across Russia compiled “memory pages” listing the names of the fallen homeland soldiers. Then, this month, they deleted them: A court ruled that those lists were state secrets.
“We’re sorry,” speak webpage 74.ru in Chelyabinsk in Siberia, “to the fathers, mothers, wives and children, relatives and friends of servicemen who lost their lives in the special military operation in Ukraine.”
