The invasion of the Ukraine was to be a lightning war, a blitzkrieg, in and out. Get to Kyiv, set up a puppet government and return to Moscow victorious. Instead, it has become an old-fashioned war of attrition, with the front line deadlocked and hundreds (if not thousands) of soldiers killed every day. Russia believes it has the demographics and arsenal to exhaust the Ukrainians and, if they don't win Kyiv, at least not lose the ground they've won. Ukraine has shown that it has the preparation and the courage to resist, a pride that feeds the soldiers at the front, but knows that if it wants to win it needs weapons, that's why they use every international loudspeaker to ask for them. "I know it will sound strange coming from a Nobel Peace Prize," said the Ukrainian Oleksandra Matviichuk, president of the Center for Civil Liberties, last December in Strasbourg, "but I ask you for arms."
“With each passing day, Ukraine exists a little more. And that is the great defeat of Putin and the great victory of Ukraine. Whatever happens, this will remain forever”, says Cidob researcher Carmen Claudín, one of the leading experts on the post-Soviet space. The Ukrainians' ability and determination to resist has galvanized their national identity and their will for independence, but the cost is immeasurable.
It is difficult to put numbers to horror, not only because of the difficulty of collecting them in the midst of the chaos of a war, but also because looking at the meter often makes us forget that we are talking about human lives. The latest UN data, from February 5, speak of more than 7,000 civilian deaths and 11,000 wounded, especially in the eastern regions, Donestk and Lugansk, although it warns that the real figure could be much higher. But if we talk about uniformed, the numbers skyrocket. Although it is even more difficult to come up with figures, especially considering that both sides use them for their propaganda, US and Western sources estimate that there are between 180,000 and 200,000 Russian victims – dead and wounded – and some 100,000 Ukrainian ones. The latest death figures offered by Kyiv in December speak of 13,000 dead soldiers. Moscow has not provided data since April, but on December 9 an investigation by the independent Russian media Meduza together with the BBC was able to confirm 10,000 deaths.
In recent weeks, with the Bakhmut front turned into a “human chopper”, the death toll is rising exponentially. If at the beginning of the month there was talk of hundreds of victims a day in this area alone, the Ukrainian army assured a few days ago that some 824 Russian soldiers are dying a day in February. Some dizzying data that the British Ministry of Defense described as “probably accurate”.
The Russian invasion has caused the largest and fastest exodus since World War II, according to the UN. Nearly 14 million people have left their homes in search of safety for their families. More than 8 million Ukrainians have left their country (as if all of Catalonia and a little more had been emptied). On the other hand, the latest data from the World Organization for Migration (IOM) suggests that there are 5.4 million internally displaced persons.
"If we look at Europe from space at night, Ukraine is a black spot," said the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, during a recent visit to Barcelona. Russia has again used General Winter as a weapon. In her war of attrition, energy infrastructures have been one of her key objectives. In December, more than ten million Ukrainians faced the cold without water, heating or electricity, said the UN, which estimated that 50% of the country's energy infrastructure was affected. There is no place in Ukraine that does not suffer blackouts and 18 million people, 40% of the population, need humanitarian aid. The Kyiv School of Economics calculates in its latest report that the total documented cost of damage to the country's infrastructure amounts to almost 129 billion euros, something like Hungary's annual GDP.
“The spectacle that Moscow is putting on with what was supposed to be the country that was the closest to its brothers has made it lose its post-Soviet neighborhood completely,” says Claudín. Not only that, but “it has fundamentally changed the attitude of most countries toward Russia,” adds Judy Dempsey, a Carnegie Europe researcher and editor-in-chief of the influential international relations blog Strategic Europe. "The Russian invasion has justified the fears of countries like the Baltics or Poland and has convinced the big ones, like France and Germany, that all relations with Russia have ended," says the former journalist.
Moscow is today more isolated than ever. NATO grows and strengthens, the EU countries send tanks and the debate on fighters and long-range missiles opens, China is considering how long it will support a destabilizing agent that is harming international trade. “The only safe and active allies that it has right now are North Korea and Iran,” says Claudín.
Last week, before the European Parliament, Ukrainian President Volodimir Zelensky assured that Ukraine's fight goes beyond its own survival, it fights to preserve "the European way of life". Dempsey agrees with him: “The idea of Europe is completely at risk. If Russia wins she will have the self-confidence to interfere in the other Eastern European countries. There will be instability, uprisings and bloodshed that will affect the entire continent." After a year of war, is the idea of a friendly neighborhood with the Russian bear dead? Claudín is clear: "We have not buried it, the Kremlin has buried it."
