Tetiana Vatsenko-Bondareva reacts as she visits the grave of her husband Denys Bondarev, 38, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, at a cemetery in Poltava, Ukraine May 25, 2023. REUTERS/Dan Peleschuk
Reuters: Spreadsheet of the Dead: Counting the Cost of War in Central Ukraine
POLTAVA, Ukraine (Reuters) -In peacetime, Viktor Tkachenko tracks local tenders, court registries and other open sources for a news outlet in central Ukraine.
These days, the reserved 33-year-old fills a spreadsheet with the names of Ukrainian soldiers from Poltava region killed since Russia's full-scale invasion began – 1,072 at last count – which is used in regular round-ups that typically contain between 10 and 40 names.
"It's a frightening system, but it's a system," Tkachenko said of the grim task of cataloguing the fallen and informing readers of Poltavshchyna, an online outlet of local news covering everything from political intrigue to power outages.
"It's clear this won't end soon."
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WNU Editor: The Ukraine government does not publicize its casualty numbers. So what Ukrainians are doing is exactly what Reuters is reporting on in the above post .... Ukrainians are using open sources such as Facebook, where relatives and local officials often post individual death announcements, to come to some idea on what is the true human cost of the war. This is an imperfect method that I am sure is under-reporting the true toll of war. But it is at least a system.
As for the 1,072 count from the Poltava region .... this is a shocking number. Before the war about 1.3 million people lived there. My gut tells me that this population is now half of that, if not more. The numbers also do not include the missing.
On a side note. My cousin maintains a social media page for families to post information on a loved one that is missing in action. My cousin told me that she stopped counting when she hit the 60,000 MIA mark of Ukrainian soldiers two months ago. She thinks the real number of missing soldiers is around 100,000, and that most are probably dead.
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