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Putin’s war has nearly a million casualties – negotiations are not the answer
Ukraine and Putin’s war against Ukraine and the West are certainly evident in the news. Among that coverage are articles about the human cost of the war.
The front pages of both The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal today focus on the bloodshed resulting from the war and are set out below.
The Post focuses on the increasing mention – pressure – toward negotiations to end the war but discusses the disinterest of the people of Ukraine in negotiating with Putin, their commitment to the people in the illegally occupied territories, and their realistic view of negotiating anything with Putin and the Kremlin. They see clearly their terrible future and the future of Europe if they do not defeat Russia.
The Wall Street Journal article discusses the nearly one million dead and injured during the war. This totally unnecessary loss of human life is the result of Putin’s barbaric invasion and self-serving – and wrong – view of history and Russia’s need for empire.
The loss of life is one reason for pressure for a quick end to the war with no appreciation or care about the catastrophic consequences of what would come next.
Negotiations are not the answer – giving Ukraine the weapons and dropping the restrictions on their use so Ukraine can defeat Russia is the answer. And that answer is past due.
I recommend both articles and a third one for which there is a link at the end. It reports on Russia’s selling of stolen Ukrainian grain to fund Putin’s war machine.
The Washington Post
‘Sprinkled with our blood’: Why so many Ukrainians resist land for peace
Ukraine is under pressure to cut a deal to end the war, especially if Trump wins, but there is likely to be fierce opposition from some soldiers and their families in the east.
[I note that above the fold on the front page of the print edition of today’s Post, the headline is: “In east Ukraine, land for peace s nonstarter – Kyiv is under pressure to cut a deal, but soldiers say it would feel ‘like losing a limb’” RAM]
By Francesca Ebel and Serhii Korolchuk | September 16, 2024 at 1:00 a.m. EDT
POKROVSK, Ukraine — As Russian forces advance through Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, the pressure is increasing on Kyiv to sit down at the table with Moscow and start talking land for peace.
Even as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky heads to the United States bearing a “victory plan” for President Joe Biden that he says will end the war in Ukraine’s favor, the future of U.S. leadership is on a knife-edge. Republican nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), have made it clear that their plan for the end of the war would involve Ukraine ceding territory.
Any kind of “land for peace” deal would probably seal the fate of Donbas, which has been mired in conflict and separatism stoked by Moscow since the war there began a decade ago. Polling, however, shows that Ukrainians are not ready to give up their land, especially among those soldiers in Donbas who have been fighting for it for the past 10 years. [And we have fought the mislabeling involved with the word “separatists” since Putin started this war in 2014. The so-called “separatists” were and are led by regular Russian forces, and clever on-going propaganda sells the line that they are Ukrainians wishing to separate from Ukraine. Combine that line with Putin’s early line about invading to save Russian-speakers, and the early Russian-fed confusion still lingers. Virtually everyone in Ukraine speaks Russian, a legacy of the Russification efforts during the Soviet days. And, of course, who has suffered the most under Putin’s war – Russian-speakers in eastern Ukraine. RAM]
“There would be a coup d’état, because this idea would be promoted by those who sit in peaceful cities. … No one here would support it — this land is now sprinkled with our blood,” said Veronika, 23, a combat medic who resettled in Slovyansk after she fled Donetsk city with her family as a teenager, when Russian-backed separatists captured it in 2014. As with several others interviewed for this article, The Washington Post is not identifying Veronika by her full name in keeping with military rules.
An opinion poll by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology conducted in May found that a third of Ukrainians are now prepared to make territorial concessions to Russia if this would bring a swift end to the war and preserve Ukraine’s independence. But more than half the population still rejects the idea of conceding land for peace. [“Land for peace” is a mischaracterization. Ukraine’s defense is about far more than geography; it is about people. Far too little is written about the horror in the territory occupied by Russia – churches destroyed, clergy tortured and killed, suppression of innocents, obliteration of Ukrainian culture, and the continuation of abducting Ukrainian children, among other outrages. President Zelenskyy has made it clear that the objective is to free the people. RAM]
Earlier polling by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that nearly half of Ukrainians were ready to engage in negotiations with Russia, but the number plummeted if territorial concessions were put on the table. Nearly two-thirds, for instance, rejected a settlement that would freeze “the current front lines,” and 86 percent didn’t trust Russia not to attack even after signing a treaty. [Ukrainians and the people of other countries bordering Russia have a well-formulated view of the reality of Putin and Russian leaders. It has been a long time leaders in Washington must gain wisdom from experiences repeated over and over in history. RAM]
And while only 7 percent said they would join an armed protest in case of territorial concessions, that number more than doubled among soldiers and veterans — including those who have been fighting for the past decade, who have seen Russian forces raze the Ukrainian cities they capture to the ground, and who are now grappling with the prospect of losing their long-contested homeland.
Zelensky insists this won’t happen and has repeatedly talked about his plan — without revealing any details except that it involves the Ukrainian push into Russia’s Kursk region last month — which he says will push Moscow to end the war.
‘Like losing a limb’
Pasha, 34, a former coal miner from Pokrovsk who now serves as a drone commander, said the loss of Donbas would be “cataclysmic” and that there was no guarantee that would be the end of it. “Russia is a country of imperialistic ambitions — they will not stop.”
Many fighters insist that negotiating with Russia never works. Having lived through the failure of the Minsk agreements — a barely implemented 2014-2015 cease-fire deal that Russian President Vladimir Putin scrapped two days before the 2022 invasion — those in Donbas believe a land-for-peace deal would only give Moscow time to rebuild itself before attempting another invasion.
Natalia Bredova, 38, of Slovyansk, knows the cost of the war too well. Her 20-year-old son, Volodymyr, was killed fighting in Avdiivka in March. Her husband is also serving in the army.
“Too many men have died for this — it’s too late to talk about negotiations. They are the light of our nation. We have to keep on fighting,” she said, adding that she would never live under Russian occupation even if she were “offered piles of gold.”
To many Ukrainians from Donbas — a large coal basin that was once a jewel in the industrial crown of the Soviet empire — the looming threat of Russian occupation has been a fact of life for years.
Vitaliy Barabash, the head of Avdiivka’s military administration, has been fighting Russia since 2014. The city was finally captured by Russia in the winter after a decade of fighting.
Now he sits in a dingy backroom office in Pokrovsk, finishing his remaining administrative tasks, including helping residents to claim compensation for lost homes and coordinating hubs for Avdiivka’s refugees in Dnipro. One wall is adorned with the flags of Donbas and Avdiivka, the latter a jagged red flame set against a green background, symbolizing the flame that once burned over Avdiivka’s massive steel factory.
“I’ve been in the military since 2014, so I know what it feels like to lose territory,” he said. “But many people are hurting … and this felt like losing a limb.”
Barabash disappeared for three days after Russia captured Avdiivka, he said. “I needed to be alone. … Even my relatives knew not to reach out to me. I was in a really bad mental state.” These days, he likes to go to the shooting range or drive his motorcycle around Dnipro to cope with the stress.
He does not believe that Zelensky would sign a peace deal that would “abandon” Donbas — and said that it would be a “stupid mistake” to reason with Moscow. “Most people are hopeful that we will return to Avdiivka. They are ready to live in tents and rebuild this city.”
Stoking divisions in the east
Putin has long claimed that one of his justifications for the war in Ukraine was to defend the Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine from what he falsely claimed was genocide. Russian soldiers interviewed by The Post in Russia cited this as a key reason for why they believed the war must continue. [Putin sticks with his lies and comes up with new ones, and sadly, when repeated in news stories, there are those who then think there must be some truth in what he says. Putin is EVIL and should be treated as such. RAM]
While pro-Russian sentiment and nostalgia for the Soviet past have historically been higher in the east than other parts of Ukraine, there are many Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Donbas who want it to remain Ukrainian — especially since the full-scale invasion in 2022. [See – this “Russian-speaker” narrative is woven into this article. Hello! In the Soviet Union, everyone had to speak Russian. Everyone in Ukraine spoke Russian it had nothing to do with nationality. Yes, historically, there were more linkages to Russia in eastern Ukraine, but (a) look at the map I have inserted of the votes in favor of Ukrainian independence in the December 1, 1991, referendum on independence – as for Crimea in 1991, 54% would almost be a landslide in the United States, and (b) Putin’s bloody war has united all of the people of Ukraine against Putin and Russia. RAM]
Since the conflict began in 2014, thousands of lives and homes have been lost in the name of the Kremlin’s claim to be defending Russian speakers. And as Russian troops moved west, the people of Donbas have been forced to abandon family homes full of memories and belongings, and watch as their towns and villages were bombed beyond recognition.
Others, after living away for months or years as refugees, missed their homes and the region’s warm summers, endless sunflower fields and distinctive slag heaps punctuating the horizon. They cautiously returned home and learned to live a few miles from the front lines under the relentless threat of missile strikes. Now, many are packing their bags again, ready to go if Russian forces get any closer.
“With full-scale war, the masks were torn off; everything became definite, unambiguous and concrete,” said Yegor Firsov, 35, a lawmaker who represented Donetsk in Ukraine’s parliament before the invasion and who now serves as a combat medic in Niu-York on the front lines.
Firsov remembers Donetsk before the occupation as an affluent, cosmopolitan place: a city that once saw Beyoncé perform at Donbas Arena and hosted the 2012 European Football Championships, when hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians came together waving blue-and-yellow flags, cheering for Ukraine.
But Donetsk could also be a “dangerous, rough, often wild” place, he said in an interview in Pokrovsk over the summer. People increasingly felt that the region and their grievances were going ignored by Kyiv. As local oligarchs amassed more power, the city’s political plurality faded and Donetsk gradually became more overtly sympathetic toward Moscow.
“Donetsk was big money, big enterprises and big factories left over from the Soviet Union,” Firsov said. “And to keep power in the same hands, the incumbent elite chose a monolithic, single path … and the people of Donbas, at the time, supported this.”
Having led the city’s pro-European protests in 2014, Firsov is well acquainted with the effects of Russian propaganda.
Russian state TV told Donbas residents for a decade that Kyiv was bombing their homes and that then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was to blame for the conflict. But when the invasion started, Firsov recalls how thousands of men and women joined up to serve in the Brigade of the Territorial Defense of the Donetsk Region. “It was clear that the enemy is Russia, it is the aggressor, it is destroying us and our homes,” he said.
‘All our territories’
If some Ukrainians once felt that Donbas was a separate part of the country that could be discarded, the full-scale invasion appears to have changed this sentiment for many, even in the west of the country.
After the war began in 2014, some Donbas refugees felt marginalized in the parts of the country to which they fled. People treated them like they were the root of Ukraine’s instability and would only bring trouble. Now that losing one’s home and living as a refugee have become a shared experience for Ukrainians throughout the country, the people in Donbas say there is greater empathy.
Many in Donbas are increasingly adopting Ukrainian, rather than Russian, as their primary language. Soldiers from other parts of the country, who had never previously been to eastern Ukraine, have resettled in the region. Some have married locals and started families.
“It was the war in Donbas in 2014; now it is the war in Ukraine,” Firsov said. “If earlier there was a discussion about whether we need Donbas, whether we can give it up, now there is no such discussion. These are all our territories — and we claim them all.”
Sitting by the waterside of Slovyansk’s salt lake, as the sun lowered in the sky and children splashed and played in the mud around them, Mykola and Artem, two soldiers from Ukraine’s north, were enjoying an hour’s respite in the summer, waiting for orders from their commander.
They had arrived in Donbas a month earlier — it was the first time they had seen this part of the country.
“There are a lot of emotions when you come here, given its history,” Artem said. “But you can’t slice up a country like a piece of pie. This is very much a part of Ukraine: same nature, same trees, same sun.”
The Wall Street Journal
One Million Are Now Dead or Injured in the Russia-Ukraine War
High losses on both sides are posing problems on battlefield and accelerating demographic fears
By Bojan Pancevski | Updated Sept. 17, 2024 12:04 am ET
KYIV, Ukraine—The number of Ukrainians and Russians killed or wounded in the grinding 2½-year war has reached roughly one million, a staggering toll that two countries struggling with shrinking prewar populations will pay far into the future.
Determining the exact number of dead and wounded in the conflict has been difficult, with Russia and Ukraine declining to release official estimates or, at times, putting out figures that are widely mistrusted.
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.
The losses are causing problems for Russia as it uses waves of poorly trained soldiers to try to advance in Ukraine’s east while also trying to counter a recent Ukrainian incursion in the Kursk region. But they are significantly more damaging for Ukraine, with a population less than one-quarter the size of its giant neighbor’s.
The high—and fast-rising—tolls on both sides highlight what will be a devastating long-term effect for countries that were struggling with population declines before the war mainly because of economic turmoil and social upheavals. They also illuminate one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s own motivations behind launching the invasion in 2022: to boost Russia’s population by absorbing Ukrainians. Russia’s invasions and capture of Ukrainian territory over the past decade have caused Ukraine to lose at least 10 million people under occupation or as refugees, according to government estimates and demographers.
Ukrainian and Russian population levels.
Source: United Nations
Putin has long declared addressing Russia’s chronic demographic decline a priority, and the Kremlin has since embarked on a campaign of Russifying occupied territories, including large-scale abduction of children and pressuring Ukrainians to obtain Russian citizenship. In the occupied Donbas region, selling property and other transactions now require obtaining Russian citizenship.
Today’s Ukraine was once part of the Russian Empire, and Putin has repeatedly said he seeks to revert the country to that state. He denies Ukrainian identity and statehood and claims that Ukrainians, a largely Slavic and Orthodox Christian people, are in fact part of the Russian nation. [OK – once again, Putin’s self-serving view is reported with no mention of genuine history and the scholarly refutations of Putin’s worldview. The many examples of Russia claiming Ukraine’s history are evidence of the Kremlin’s pathetic, deep-seated inferiority, but acceptance of Russian lies permeates Western reporting. RAM]
“Demographics is a priority for Putin, and he wants to use Ukraine and its people to consolidate the Slavic core of Russia,” said Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian-born political scientist and an author of a coming book on
European demographics. “But for Ukraine, the dilemma is existential: How many people can you lose in a war before losing your future?”
Putin’s single most effective measure to boost Russia’s population before the full-scale invasion was the annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, which added around 2.4 million people to Russia, according to Krastev, who based his estimates on the latest Russian census.
While Russia has gained population by grabbing territory, the war has had a devastating effect on its internal demographics and the labor market. Well over 600,000 Russians fled the country since the full-scale invasion started. They are mainly younger and upwardly mobile professionals who were able to afford relocating to foreign countries and starting a new life.
Russia has traditionally relied on labor migration from Central Asia, but the war reduced, and in some cases even reversed, the flow of migrant workers. This exacerbated the growing labor shortage in Russia as Siberia and the Far East are rapidly depopulating. Government-linked experts have publicly floated the idea of importing workers from North Korea.
Russia’s assaults on Ukraine have had a catastrophic effect on its neighbor’s population. The most recent census, in 2001, recorded 48 million inhabitants. At the start of 2022, before Russia invaded, that had fallen to 40 million, including regions such as Crimea that Russia occupied in 2014, according to Ukrainian demographers and government officials. With over six million fleeing Ukraine since the start of the war in February 2022, according to the United Nations, and Russia seizing further land, the total population on Kyiv-controlled territory has now dropped to between 25 million and 27 million, according to previously undisclosed Ukrainian government estimates.
Oleksandr Gladun, a researcher at the Ptoukha Institute for Demography, gave higher estimates of 42 million for the prewar population of all of Ukraine and around 29 million living on government-controlled territory at the start of this year. The population of Ukraine can only be calculated a couple of years after the end of the war when the number of returnees will be clear, he said.
The effect could be enduring. Alongside military deaths, Ukraine’s birthrate also collapsed to the lowest recorded level: In the first half of this year, three times as many people died as were born, according to government data. Some 250,000 deaths and over 87,000 births were recorded in this period, which is 9% less than the same period last year, according to government figures. In 2021, the year before the full-scale invasion, over 130,000 births were recorded.
Russia’s way of war is also aimed at making Ukraine unlivable. Russian missile-and-drone attacks have knocked out large parts of Ukraine’s energy grid, including power stations, which could drive many more Ukrainians to seek refuge outside the country this winter if it leads to major electricity and heat outages. [Interesting language, polite, non-judgmental – “Russia’s way of war is also aimed at making Ukraine unlivable.” Really? Russia’s barbaric war is a tsunami of war crimes and genocide that, if seen clearly for what they are, would disgust and motivate the world to give Ukraine everything it needs to defeat Russia immediately. RAM]
Ukraine’s government, like that of Russia, keeps its war casualties secret. President Volodymyr Zelensky said in February that around 31,000 soldiers have so far been killed. Several former political and security officials said that underestimate was largely designed to placate society and help continue the mobilization of much-needed new recruits. A spokesman for Zelensky declined to comment.
One of the key reasons Zelensky refuses to mobilize the key cohort of men aged between 18 and 25—typically the bulk of any fighting force—is because most of these people haven’t had children yet, according to the former Ukrainian officials. Should the recruits of that age group die or become incapacitated, future demographic prospects would dim further, Ukrainian demographers say.
Ukraine has therefore resisted calls from Western partners to throw more men into the fight and has only implemented partial mobilization. The average age of Ukrainian fighters is now over 43, according to estimates by government and military officials. Kyiv has been recruiting small numbers of convicts and foreigners to boost numbers. [Western “partners” urge Ukraine to throw more men …. These are the same “partners” who have provided Ukraine critical weapons in a pattern of too little, too late and have never committed to giving Ukraine what they know Ukraine needs to defeat Russia. If Ukraine knew and experienced western support committed to defeat Russia, many things might change. RAM]
The civilian death toll remains unknown. Russia’s 2022 conquest of the southeastern port city of Mariupol alone claimed over 8,000 lives, according to estimates by Human Rights Watch, a nongovernmental organization.
Ievgeniia Sivorka contributed to this article.
European demographics. “But for Ukraine, the dilemma is existential: How many people can you lose in a war before losing your future?”
There is a third article – another from The Wall Street Journal - you might want to read reporting on how Russia sells grain stolen from Ukraine to fund its war machine against Ukraine.
EXCLUSIVE
How Russia Profits From Ukraine Invasion by Selling Stolen Grain on a Global Black Market
ROBERT MCCONNELL
Co-Founder, U.S.-Ukraine Foundation
Director of External Affairs, Friends of Ukraine Network
The introduction and the parenthetical comments are Mr. McConnell’s and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation or those of the Friends of Ukraine Network (FOUN).