Monitoring Desk
GENEVA: Quantifying the toll of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine remains an elusive task as Friday marked one year since Russian forces invaded neighbouring Ukraine with no end to the conflict in sight.
Estimates of the refugees, casualties and economic fallout from the war produce a vague picture of the suffering and deaths. Precise figures may never come for some of the categories the international organizations are attempting to find out. UN human rights experts count civilians wounded and killed but know their tally falls significantly short. Neither Ukraine nor Russia has provided an updated accounting of their troop losses. Even the scope of the weaponry that the Western countries have sent to Ukraine is not clear, reported Arab News.
Roughly 3,500 airstrikes, 5,000 missile strikes and 1,000 drone strikes account for the firepower that Russia launched against Ukraine in 2022, according to a senior official in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Brig. Gen. Oleksiy Hromov.
The Russian forces were controlling 18 percent of the total Ukrainian land as of Thursday, as per the Institute for the Study of War, a think-tank. That’s down from the 27 percent on March 23 last year, before Ukrainian counteroffensives recaptured vast areas of land — but up from the 7 percent held by Russia and Russia-aligned separatists before February 24 last year, as part of an armed rebellion in eastern Ukraine that began in 2014, and Russia’s annexation of Crimea same year.
Potential Russian war crimes including indiscriminate bombings, killings, kidnappings, and sexual assaults that being investigated by the Ukraine’s prosecutor-general stood at 71,905. Reporting by the “Frontline,” and The Associated Press, and recorded in a public database, has independently verified 639 incidents that appear to have violated the laws of war.
Quantifying casualties
The confirmed civilian deaths in Ukraine since Russia’s invasion, through February 15 stood at 8,006, according to the United Nations human rights office. The office uses strict methodology and said verification of thousands of reported deaths is still pending in Russian-occupied cities such as Lysychansk, Mariupol, and Sievierodonetsk.
The United Nations rights office recorded 3,382 civilian deaths in Ukraine for March 2022, the highest number for a single month of the Ukraine-Russia war while the war left 13,287 civilians injured over the 2022, according to the United Nations. Russia’s most recent count, from September last year, of its troops killed in Ukraine since Feb. last year is 5,937.
However, Western Estimate of Russian troops killed and wounded puts the tally around 200,000. Britain’s Defence Ministry has estimated 40,000-60,000 Russian troops have died fighting in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s most recent count of its troops’ losses since the Russian invasion, provided by Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces in August is 9,000. While according to the estimate of the Western officials about Ukrainian troops killed or wounded is more than 100,000.
The number of the refugees who fled Ukraine after the Russian invasion is 8.1 million, based on figures provided by national governments. The number includes more than 5.2m in over 40 central Asian and European countries, including over 880,000 in Germany, nearly 1.6 million in Poland, and nearly 2.9m who went to Russia, according to the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.
The number of the people who were driven from their homes but stayed inside Ukraine remains 5.4 million, according to a January 23 count by the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The number of internally displaced people swelled in early May last year, when IOM reported there were more than 8 million.
As many as 5.6 million Ukrainians returned to their homes, either from abroad or within Ukraine, according to the latest IOM stats. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, still 17.6 million people in Ukraine need humanitarian aid.
According to the latest figures of Kyiv School of Economics from January 24, the total losses caused to Ukraine’s infrastructure due to the war has been estimated at $138 billion.
The International Monetary Fund has estimated a 33 percent minimum decline in Ukraine’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2022 however, the final numbers are pending.
According to the IMF, expected decline in Russia’s GDP in 2022 is 2.2 percent while 30 percent decline in the value of Ukrainian exports last year was reported by the World Trade Organization.
