Good morning. Enjoy the Super Bowl? The Seahawks sure did. It’ll be busy at the Olympics today, and we have more news below. I’m going to start, though, in Ukraine.
A terrible milestoneAn astonishing number of Russians and Ukrainians have died, vanished or been wounded during four years of war. Casualties in the conflict are on track to pass two million this spring — about two-thirds of them from Russia. Last year, according to a recent study, Russian casualties were recorded at nearly 35,000 a month. It is a grim accounting, and it is ongoing. With peace talks seemingly at an impasse after last week’s negotiations yielded little more than a prisoner swap, and hostilities between the nations flaring in the region’s brutal winter, I wondered what those numbers looked like on the ground. What do they feel like for Ukrainians and Russians fighting, or living, on the front lines? I reached out to Times reporters who could tell me. Trench warfare, and then dinner at home
Andrew Kramer is the Kyiv bureau chief. With his team, he’s covering the largest war in Europe since World War II. In 2023, he shared with his colleagues below a Pulitzer Prize in international reporting for coverage of the Russian invasion. He said: It is a stunning number. I was driving in a town in central Ukraine last summer. All the cars pulled over, and we did, too. People got out and knelt. Somebody in the town had scattered flowers on the street, along the centerline. A funeral cortege rolled past with many cars filled with soldiers. And then we got back in and kept going. In many towns I’ve been to, dried flowers blow around on the streets. It’s common to see them when you’re parking a car or walking on a sidewalk. And late last year, the military cemetery in Lviv filled up. It’s now an expanse of Ukrainian flags, which are put on the graves of soldiers. A new cemetery is opening nearby. And here’s something to consider: There are no real military bases in Ukraine. They would be bombed. The entire army is spread out in abandoned houses in villages in the east, in rented apartments and empty basements. The soldiers live with a few friends, cook their own meals and do their own laundry. They are on duty in trenches for three or four days, typically, though sometimes for weeks and in rare cases for months, and then they’re off for three or four days in their homes. Some plant gardens. The soldiers are more integrated with Ukrainian communities than they would be if they were quartered on army bases. A war at the fringes of societyIvan Nechepurenko covers Russia and the territory beyond it — Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus and Central Asia. He was born in Russia and raised in Ukraine, and he has reported from the region since 2013. He said: Most Russians want the Kremlin to negotiate an end to the war — 61 percent, according to a recent poll. But only 21 percent said they would want Russia to make concessions, and 59 percent said that if peace was unattainable now, Russia had to double down on its strikes against Ukraine. People in Russia want peace, but on Russia’s terms. And this is what you hear on the ground in Russia, too. There are many who don’t support President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade, or who oppose the Kremlin overall. But they fear that, should Russia lose in Ukraine, their lives could just collapse as they did in the 1990s during the painful post-Soviet transition. And as for the human toll, the Kremlin has built a sophisticated recruitment scheme, where older men who couldn’t find their way in life are paid lavishly to fight. That basically shields the larger population from the war, pushing it to the fringes of Russian society. Carnage far from the front
Marc Santora has been covering the war since its start. He said: The scale of death and destruction has been perhaps the hardest thing to convey to readers. The front line, which scarcely resembles a line in any traditional sense, has grown deadlier year after year as the vast kill zone that separates the two sides has expanded and drones and robots make any movement within it a deadly gambit. That kill zone stretches more than 750 miles — about the distance from Chicago to New York. I have traveled often to the medical outposts on the front, and each time I’ve been struck by how unrelenting the pace of battle is, no matter the season. But the carnage extends far beyond the front, with cities and towns under routine bombardments. Trying to find ways to live when surrounded by death has been the central struggle for millions of Ukrainians for more than four years. Recently, Russia struck a passenger train, killing at least three civilians — an attack that would once have been considered shocking and is now sadly routine. Tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians have been killed or wounded, too. It binds the nation with its fighting men and women in a profound way. People often ask who is winning. But that seems like the wrong question. Ukrainians are keenly aware of the price they are paying. But as long as Russia remains intent on destroying the Ukrainian state, they see no alternative.
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