Dead Men Tell Many Tales
An estimated 18 000 civilian deaths, 1250 of whom are children; over 17 million people who have fled Ukraine in 2022; a shrinking of the Ukrainian economy by 35%; a staggering total of 200 000 military casualties evenly split between Russia and Ukraine; an increase in European gas and electricity prices by well over 100% between February and September 2022; these are the estimated numbers describing the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that began on 24 February 2022. As is typical of any war, it is frustratingly difficult to get any reasonably accurate numbers of the effects of the war, as each side will likely attempt to use the figures in order to project its own military might (by inflating the number of enemy soldiers killed and minimising its own deaths) as well as to gain the moral high ground and demonise the opponent’s war efforts (by reporting greater civilian deaths caused by the enemy and minimising those inflicted by its own troops). As is also typical of any war, there is a certain dry cynicism to using numbers to describe the proceedings of the war. Numbers fail to convey the tales that the dead tell through their damning silence in mass graves, and pale next to the unnerving accounts of those who have survived the horrors, though few of these are unscathed. Numbers fail to capture the full extent of the humanitarian damage done, the unspeakable atrocities committed, the manner in which war brings out the absolute worst in people, the trauma caused, and the resentment it breeds among the innocents on both camps towards each other that will endure throughout generations, even long after the war will have ended. They do, however, reveal an unsavoury reality that took most of Western Europe by surprise, namely that war and armed conflict are still a part of Europe’s contemporary geopolitical reality. More
