Anyone casually reading the legacy newspapers or tuning in to the rest of the mainstream media could be forgiven for thinking that Ukraine was fighting a war without military causalities on its side. Russian bombs and Russian aggression selectively appeared to be killing only civilians and anyone who died fighting for Ukraine was a mercenary. It has been known that Ukraine was unwilling to release figures on military casualties which should be juxtaposed with how readily they turned the spotlight on civilian casualties.
I don’t recall hearing any news reports or seeing headlines in the weekend newspapers about Ukraine casualties (other than civilian). Perhaps I was not digging deeply enough but I did search in vain in the BBC News site only at the weekend. The picture regarding Ukrainian casualties has been the same on ITV News and CNN. It is not possible to search the Sky News website.
Then this week things changed with a leading article, courtesy of Reuters, on the BBC News site claiming that anything up to 100,000 troops may have died on both sides with additional civilian casualties. It is hard to know what has prompted this outburst of honesty. Perhaps the sense that the war is ending with the Ukrainians having reclaimed Kherson and Russia seemingly in retreat has induced a sense that the casualties on both sides cannot be hidden for much longer.
Ukraine has always been reluctant to reveal its war losses. The NYT in May reported that ‘Ukraine has not shared its own military casualty information, but President Volodymyr Zelensky said last week at Davos that as many as 100 servicemen might be dying every day’ in the Donbas region. Only the next month, however, Axios reported that the figure was more likely to be 1000 a day. Ukraine casualties are vaguely referred to, as they were recently by First Lady Olena Zelenska (‘UK counts pennies, we count casualties’), if Ukraine is trying to squeeze more weapons out of the west.
The mainstream media only seem to expect truth about reporting casualties when it comes to the Russians who, apparently, are hiding their number of casualties. Hiding casualty numbers is nothing new and was certainly a feature of the First World War. The reasons are not to demoralise the folks back home or to discourage young men of fighting age to sign up. But, while Ukraine has been ‘given a bye’ over casualty numbers, there have been expressions of horror that Russia is hiding theirs. WORLDCRUNCH describe it as ‘an old, ugly Russian habit’, CNN referred to hospitals that were concealing deaths and the LA Times referred to Russian ‘silence’ over casualties. Bloomberg reckoned that Putin could not hide the facts about Russian soldiers’ death from their mothers and keep them silent forever.
Nobody in their right mind could take pleasure in knowing the precise number of casualties on either side of the Ukraine war. The first casualty in any war is always the truth and we have been played like fools over the war in Ukraine. We have been played for fools by our government and our mainstream media, the Russian people have been played for fools by Vladimir Putin and let’s not forget the people of Ukraine. On that point, I leave the final word to Global Times:
‘There is no free lunch in the world. More US weapons have caused more Ukrainians to die. Worse, the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022, which was signed into law by Biden, would drag Ukraine into a debt trap, turning the war-torn country into a new colony of the US. The act allows the US to use the military lend-lease program to speed up the transfer of weapons, military equipment, medicine and food to Ukraine. It is anticipated that the recipient country will have to pay later.’
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