The Human Cost Of Mounting Ukrainian Casualties

BBC correspondent, Quentin Sommerville, provides a heart rending and devastating report on the scope and scale of Ukraine’s war casualties. The Western media has tried to ignore this video and, after you watch it, you’ll understand why.

This video was posted last Tuesday (29 August), which means the video and script were done at least two days prior to that. Apart from the quality of the reporting, the piece rises to film art, particularly the opening segment.

The companion article, ‘Dying by the dozens every day’ – Ukraine losses climb, is posted at the BBC website. For some reason the BBC did not link to the video. Given the BBC’s relationship with the British Government I think it is fair to conclude that some in the British establishment can read the writing on the wall and realize that Ukraine is not only running out of soldiers; it is running out of time.

Sommerville writes:

There has been a dramatic rise in Ukraine’s number of dead, according to new estimates by unnamed US officials. . . .

Ukraine gives no official toll of its war dead – the Ukrainian armed forces have reiterated that their war casualty numbers are a state secret – but Margo knows the losses are huge.

The figures remain classified. But US officials, quoted by the New York Times, recently put the number at 70,000 dead and as many as 120,000 injured. It is a staggering figure, from an armed forces estimated at only half a million strong. The UN has recorded 9,177 civilian deaths to date. . . .

The reality of the scale of casualties is laid bare in Ukraine’s cemeteries.

In the late afternoon sun around Krasnopilske cemetery in Dnipro, the heads of the sunflowers hang heavy – an honour-guard for the freshly dug graves that spread ever closer to the perimeter. . . .

The yellow and blue of Ukrainian flags whip above each grave in the gentle breeze – there are hundreds of them. Each is a marker in the great tide of loss that sweeps daily across eastern and southern battlefields, filling cemeteries in towns and villages the length and breadth of Ukraine.

A year and a half into this war, few families here have been left untouched by grief. . . .

Sommerville’s Ukrainian sources tell him that the Russians are suffering far more casualties. That is a lie, but Sommerville is reporting what he is being told. If Russia had casualties like this there is no way Putin’s Government could quash the social media reports from grieving parents, siblings and spouses.

Since this report was prepared nine days ago, at least 7,000 more Ukrainian soldiers have died in combat. That equals the number of KIA American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan during sixteen years of fighting. Helps put in perspective the savagery of the combat underway in Ukraine.