‘Endless Caravan of Death’
A War’s Unknowable Toll and Inescapable Suffering
A little boy blown up by a mine at the beach. A young mother shot in the forehead. A retired teacher killed in her home. Soldiers killing and dying every day by the hundreds. Older people and young people and everyone in between.
A war can be measured by many metrics. Territory won or lost. Geopolitical influence increased or diminished. But for the people suffering under the shelling, who hear the crack of gunfire on the streets and the wails of loss out of shattered windows, the death toll is the most telling account of a war.
In Ukraine, no one is quite sure exactly what that toll is, except that many many people have been killed.
An “endless caravan of death,” said Petro Andryushchenko, an official for the city of Mariupol.
In its June 21 update, the Office of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said 4,597 civilians had been killed in the conflict. But it is clear that many thousands more have been killed. Ukraine’s chief of police, Ihor Klymenko, said that prosecutors had opened criminal proceedings “for the deaths of more than 12,000 people who were found, in particular, in mass graves.”
And in Mariupol, the Black Sea city flattened by Russian bombardment, Ukrainian officials in exile have said that examinations of mass graves using satellite imagery, witness testimony and other evidence have led them to believe that at least 22,000 were killed.
The figures exclude the thousands believed killed in territories held by Russian forces. And even where Ukraine has regained control, Mr. Klymenko said, it was premature to calculate the dead in mass graves, as more are found every week.
Indeed, finding and identifying the dead is such a daunting challenge, Ukraine’s chief prosecutor said in a recent statement, that it has required global coordination. The prosecutor,
Iryna Venediktova, said she had met with the International Commission on Missing Persons, based in The Hague, to develop avenues for cooperation. And on Tuesday, Merrick Garland, the United States attorney general, went to Ukraine to discuss how his office could help her efforts.
International and Ukrainian authorities have little access to embattled cities to take accurate counts, and the urban targets, constant artillery fire and static nature of the fighting in the contested south and east only adds to the horror.
“People are killed indiscriminately or suddenly or without rhyme or reason,” said Richard H. Kohn, a professor emeritus of history and peace, war and defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “It creates enormous psychological stress on populations, as it does on the combatants.”
The Russians, eager to preserve an aura of competence, underreport their battlefield losses. The Ukrainians, desperate to maintain morale, do the same. Civilian casualties are an unknown variable, multiplied by grisly factors like collapsing buildings and the occupation of towns.
Mariupol — the city that has become symbolic of Ukraine’s resistance — is still burying corpses.
Vadym Boichenko, the mayor, said, “There are a lot of mass graves, a lot of spontaneous graves, and some bodies are still in the street.”
There is dread about the losses in the 20 percent of Ukraine now under Russian occupation. Some places,
Satellite images show mass graves holding thousands of remains.
like Sievierodonetsk, have been basically reduced to rubble.
Early in the war, as Russia tried and failed to take the capital, Kyiv, its forces added to the toll with shocking brutality. In Bucha, they shot civilians dead in their cars, homes and gardens, left corpses in the street and even burned them and dumped them in a parking lot. At least 1,500 civilians were killed in the Kyiv region, Mr. Klymenko said.
The Ukrainian army is taking heavy losses. By the government’s estimates, as many as 200 soldiers are dying every day. In towns across the country, even those far from the front lines, funerals take place nearly daily for soldiers killed in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, where the fighting is now heaviest.
“I feel numb,” said Antoniy, a morgue worker in Lviv, in western Ukraine. “Even when someone is telling me a joke that I know is funny, I can’t laugh.”
Many Russians are not coming home, either. In April, Western countries estimated that Russia had lost about 15,000 soldiers in Ukraine; on June 17, Ukraine put the estimate at 33,000. The true toll is unknown, and will not be coming from Moscow: Its last announcement, on March 25, said that a total of 1,351 Russian soldiers had died.
After the invasion began, news websites across Russia listed the names of local soldiers who had died. This month, they deleted them: A court ruled such lists were state secrets.
“We apologize,” said the site 74.ru in Chelyabinsk in Siberia, “to the mothers and fathers, wives and children, relatives and friends of the servicemen who have died during the special military operation in Ukraine.”