As its two-year anniversary approaches, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been pushed into the background of public attention by the war in Gaza.
Author
Jon Richardson
Visiting Fellow, Centre for European Studies, Australian ³Ô¹ÏÍøÕ¾ University
The intense focus on Gaza has prompted comparisons between the two conflicts that tend to obscure or minimise the scale of destruction in Ukraine. “” has also deepened around the world, as the fighting drags on along relatively static front lines.
This is why, on the anniversary of the invasion, it’s important to take stock of the damage done to Ukraine and its people over the past two years. To do this, I’ve drawn on extensive reports from United Nations agencies, non-governmental organisations and international, Ukrainian and Russian media.
The overall scale of the destruction, as well as the repression of Ukrainian people and erasure of Ukrainian identity in territories annexed by Russia, lend support to the accusations that Russia has committed acts of genocide. It’s vital the world not forget this.
Civilian deaths in the tens of thousands
The Palestinian death toll in Gaza has been widely reported since the war began – it currently . The civilian death toll in Ukraine is far less certain, or discussed.
As of the end of November, the United Nations had of at least 10,000 civilians in Ukraine.
However, this is likely to be a gross underestimate, ““, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. This is because Russia has blocked UN efforts to investigate in the Russian-controlled areas of southern and eastern Ukraine where most civilian deaths have likely occurred.
The most notorious case is Mariupol, once a city of 450,000, which suffered a devastating bombardment and blockade for almost three months in 2022. Estimates of civilian deaths there range from to as high as .
Mystyslav Chernov, the Associated Press videographer whose documentary of the siege, , has been nominated for an Academy Award, estimates people have likely died. provides a similar estimate, based on interviews with workers documenting the collection of bodies from the streets.
Unlike Gazan authorities, the Ukrainian government has been reluctant to make estimates of civilian deaths, perhaps for reasons of morale. Ukraine’s war crimes prosecutor did in February 2023 the total number of Ukrainian civilians killed could be higher than 100,000. Given the destruction in Mariupol and , this seems plausible.
Half a million military casualties
Beyond the loss of civilian lives, one cannot ignore the needless waste of soldiers’ lives on both sides.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine has been forthcoming about their battlefield losses. put Russian soldier deaths at around 100,000 to 120,000 and Ukrainian soldier deaths at 70,000. The US estimated perhaps 500,000 total battlefield casualties (those killed and wounded) on both sides.
The has provided figures in the same ballpark. This also tallies with a by the BBC Russian service and independent Russian news site Mediazona, drawing on Russian media and social media. It estimated around 107,000 Russian soldier deaths and 321,000 wounded by late last year.
Most of the Ukrainian losses are young people who enlisted to defend their country from an unprovoked invasion. The stories of the dead have been recounted at length – , and other , , , , , to name a few.
About have also served in the armed forces, with more than in action.
Among the casualties are amputees – . By comparison, an estimated during the first world war.
International organisations report more than have fled Ukraine since the war began, while have been displaced inside the country. This is about a quarter of the total pre-2022 population of 41 million.
In addition, about are in need of humanitarian assistance, more than a quarter of whom are considered to be at a “catastrophic” level.
Devastated national infrastructure
The destruction of Ukraine’s infrastructure from thousands of missile and drone attacks has been equally horrific. According to the and , this includes:
10% of Ukraine’s housing stock
8,400 kilometres of roads
13% of Ukraine’s education infrastructure, including nearly 3,600 schools, kindergartens and universities
more than 1,500 attacks on
nearly 4,800 sites in the cultural, heritage and tourism sector
and extensive environmental devastation, such as , which flooded hundreds of square kilometres of land and caused some 1 million people to lose drinking water.
Ukraine’s economy in the first year of the war. The this month the total cost of rebuilding the country at US$486 billion (A$742 billion) over ten years, which is nearly three times Ukraine’s GDP in 2023.
Violent repression and coerced integration
Russia now occupies about – an area about the size of South Korea. It officially “” four regions in late 2022, following Crimea’s annexation in 2014. Russia has since embarked on an ambitious program to change these regions’ ethnic composition, erase their Ukrainian identity and potential resistance, and integrate them into the Russian Federation.
As David Lewis of Exeter University , the Kremlin hopes to create a new reality on the ground that will be difficult to challenge in future. He reports an army of technocrats is overseeing a comprehensive absorption of the occupied territories, aligning their laws, regulations and tax and banking systems with Russia.
In another , Karolina Hird notes locals are being coerced into getting Russian passports to obtain services such as health care. Similarly, occupation officials use the issuing of birth certificates, pensions, state payrolls and maternity payments to force residents to become reliant on the new government administrations.
The occupiers use violence to cement their control, as well. A has documented killings, torture, sexual violence, arbitrary arrests, deportations and rapes.
documented at least in prisons and police stations in south-eastern Ukraine. They employed such methods as electric shocks, beatings, suffocation, sleep deprivation, mock executions, threats and humiliation:
Our findings suggest that establishing torture chambers and torturing people in them was a routine practice in all places occupied by the Russian forces.
The UN special rapporteur on torture also describes these Russian torture practices across Ukraine as ““.
In a recent case, human rights groups reported the torture and murder of in the Kherson region on February 13. Podolchak had held services in Ukrainian and was under pressure from the Russian security police to change his allegiance to the Russian Orthodox Church.
According to a BBC investigation, thousands of Ukrainians are being held on mostly spurious charges in and detention centres inside Russia, with some disappearing or dying.
Mass deportations of children and cultural erasure
A year ago, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, in relation to the forced deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia. Russian officials had openly boasted of their role in the deportations, which they claimed were in the children’s interests.
Ukraine’s government has confirmed the deportations of more than . Some of the few children who have returned from Russia were told in school they would never leave Russia, that Ukraine didn’t exist and had never existed, and they were all really Russians.
As Latvia’s president, , put it recently:
Russia is actively erasing their Ukrainian identity and inflicting unbelievable emotional and psychological damage.
Hundreds of thousands of Russian settlers have simultaneously moved to the occupied regions. Crimean Tatar leaders estimate between 850,000 and 1 million Russians to Crimea alone since 2014.
This is a direct violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which obliges an occupying power not to transfer parts of its own population into a territory it occupies.
The occupation regime is also erasing Ukrainian language and culture. This is consistent with Russian nationalist ideology portraying Ukrainian as a mere dialect of Russian and the Ukrainian nation as a fiction. and have constantly expounded these myths.
A Russian curriculum has been introduced in in occupied regions, replacing previous instruction in Ukrainian in some. Hundreds of teachers are believed to have been relocated from Russia.
reports that people risk reprisals for seeking to continue Ukrainian education. Some parents choose to hide their children to avoid them being taken to “re-education” institutions or for adoption in Russia.
At one school in Kherson, Amnesty reported, security officials ordered a mother to send her 15-year-old son back to school or “a bus will come next week and take [him] to an orphanage in Russia”. A school librarian said she secretly arranged meetings with students to give them Ukrainian books to avoid Russian patrols conducting arbitrary searches.
In addition, many Ukrainian streets and towns have been given new Russian names. For example, in Melitopol, a street named after a Ukrainian political theorist of Pavel Sudoplatov, an infamous Stalinist secret agent who later boasted of organising Leon Trotsky’s assassination in Mexico.
To many observers, the erasure of Ukrainian nationhood in the occupied territories and frequent denial of Ukraine’s right to exist is evidence the Russian invasion is genocidal in nature. Some , the organisation and several national parliaments have supported this assertion.
Whether or not the threshold of genocide has been reached, the invasion constitutes the most egregious land grab of a recognised state’s territory since the second world war, as elsewhere.
It remains a mystery why some people think the Ukrainians, or the international community, would or should accept this land and its people being traded away in negotiations at the point of a gun.
Jon Richardson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
