Kyiv, Ukraine:
The war between Russia and Ukraine, the deadliest conflict Europe has seen since the World War II, marks its 1,000th day today. Over one million people have reportedly either died or have been grievously injured since the beginning of the war.
Amid the grim reality of the deadliest war of the 21st Century, cities, towns, and villages in Ukraine have been devastated and now lie in ruin. The loss of human life and material wealth keep mounting in a never-ending series of heartbreaking stories emerging from the war-torn country.
Ukraine now stands more vulnerable than at any time since the beginning of the war.
As per a report in the Wall Street Journal, “A confidential Ukrainian estimate from earlier this year put the number of dead Ukrainian troops at 80,000 and the wounded at 400,000, according to people familiar with the matter. Western intelligence estimates of Russian casualties vary, with some putting the number of dead as high as nearly 200,000 and wounded at around 400,000.”
Both Russia and Ukraine have diminishing populations and have been struggling from even before the war. The staggering death count due to the war will thereby have far-reaching demographic implications for both nations.
CIVILIAN DEATHS
While the roughly million casualties account mostly for soldiers and military personnel, the civilian casualties in Ukraine as of August 31, 2024 are documented to be at least 11,743 killed and 24,614 wounded. These figures are as per the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine.
The United Nations and Ukrainian officials say that the real number of deaths and injuries are like to be far more, adding that it is difficult to verify the deaths and injuries, especially in areas such as Mariupol that are now in Russian hands. 589 Ukrainian children have also been killed till November 14, 2024.
According to a Reuters report, tens of thousands have perished in intense fighting across heavily fortified front lines under relentless artillery fire, with tanks, armoured vehicles and infantry mounting assaults on trenches. The report also states that both sides closely guard tallies of their own military losses as national security secrets, and public estimates by Western countries based on intelligence reports vary widely.
There are estimates that Russia has suffered great losses too in terms of military deaths, accounting for more than a 1,000 dead soldiers per day during intense periods of the war. Ukraine’s President Zelensky had said in February, 2024 that more than 31,000 Ukrainian service members had been killed, which analysts believe is a very conservative estimate.
The war has also led to Ukraine’s birthrate to fall to a third of what it used to be 2.5 years ago, before the war began. While more than four million people have been displaced within Ukraine, the war has also led to more than six million Ukrainian nationals fleeing abroad – mostly to European countries. Not only has Ukraine’s mortality rate from causes other than the war surged since the conflict began, UN estimates suggest that Ukraine’s population has declined by over 10 million people, which is around a quarter of its overall population, suggesting that 25 percent of the population has been wiped out.
TERRITORY LOST
Russia now occupies and claims to have annexed around a fifth of Ukraine, an area around the size of Greece, news agency Reuters reported. Moscow’s forces initially stormed through northern, eastern and southern Ukraine in early 2022, reaching the outskirts of Kyiv in the north and crossing the Dnipro River in the south, it stated.
Moscow has even captured nearly the whole of the Donbas region in Ukraine’s east, and the entire coast of the Sea of Azov in the south.
According to the Reuters report, many cities in the frontline area that have been captured by Moscow have been destroyed, largest among them the Azov port of Mariupol, with a population before the war of around half a million. In the past year, Russia has slowly extended its grip in intense fighting, mainly in the Donbas. Ukraine, for its part, launched its first large-scale assault on Russian territory in August and has captured a sliver of western Russia’s Kursk region.
ECONOMIC IMPACT
In 2022, Ukraine’s economy shrunk by nearly a third (33 per cent) of what it used to be before the war. In 2023 however, the war-torn country made a marginal comeback and managed to reduce the economic losses to roughly 22 per cent of its original size.
As per a Reuters report, the latest available assessment by the World Bank, European Commission, United Nations and Ukrainian government found that direct war damage in Ukraine had reached $152 billion as of December, 2023, with housing, transport, commerce and industry, energy and agriculture the worst-affected sectors.
The total cost of reconstruction and recovery was estimated by the World Bank and Ukrainian government at $486 billion as of the end of December last year. The figure is 2.8 times higher than Ukraine’s nominal gross domestic product in 2023, according to economy ministry data.
Ukraine’s power sector has been particularly hard hit, with Russia regularly targeting infrastructure in long range attacks. Ukraine is also one of the world’s main sources of grain, and the interruption of its exports early in the war worsened a global food crisis. Exports have since largely recovered with Ukraine finding ways to circumvent a de facto Russian blockade.
Each day the war is costing Kyiv more than $140 million, Roksolana Pidlasa, head of Ukraine parliament’s budget committee, said. The draft 2025 budget envisages that about 26% of Ukraine’s GDP, or 2.2 trillion hryvnias ($53.3 billion), would go on defence. Ukraine has already received more than $100 billion from its Western partners in financial aid.
What we know today as Ukraine was once part of the Russian Empire and subsequently also a part of the Soviet Union till the dissolution of the USSR in 1991. Vladimir Putin has said on multiple occasions that he seeks to revert Ukraine back to the Russian Federation. President Putin has denied recognition to Ukrainian identity and statehood and claims that the people of Ukraine, who are mostly Slavic or Orthodox Christians, are in fact Russian people.
