2023-11-23 18:48:58
TRIBUNE – Third and final part of our column on the war in Ukraine and its deaths: an overall very low ratio of civilian victims for a conflict of this intensity.
According to the Brazilian journalist Lucas Leiroz, the Russian military campaign has an extremely low rate of civilian casualties compared to military casualties. He puts this at around 2%.
According to him, this is the lowest rate in any conflict since the Second World War. He compares this figure to previous wars: Korea, 74%; Bosnia and Herzegovina, 56%; Vietnam, 46% (and, considering the recent resurgence of the Israeli-Palestinian war, the proportion of civilians killed seems very high).
For Leiroz, this seems to demonstrate that Russian forces are keen to limit civilian losses. Thus, after the hard conquest phase of the first months, Russia tried to minimize losses, generally bombing strategic targets at night. Despite the massive bombardment of electrical and port infrastructure since the end of 2022, the number of victims remains limited.
As for the calculation used, if we take into account the number of deaths on the Ukrainian side confirmed by the UN, the latest update is 7,481 victims. If this corresponds to 2% of military casualties, this would give us a figure of uniformed deaths of around 375,000. However, the figures that have been circulating since September, notably those put forward by retired US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor, report 400 to 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers and assimilated killed in combat, including 75,000 since the last counter-offensive launched on June 4.
Obviously, depending on the actual figure we use for military losses, the ratio of civilian losses to military losses can change radically. We will therefore have to wait until the end of the war and the work of historians to confirm these figures. As long as we let them work…
Recall that the UN has warned that it believes the real numbers of civilian casualties are certainly higher. But we saw in the first part of this column that there were reasons to doubt that there were so many unlisted victims.
There was also an overestimation of the victims of the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s. I remember that some put forward the figure of 250,000 dead. Finally, today we think that the toll is closer to 100,000…
Russian casualties
Finally, we must not forget the Russian civilian victims in the regions bordering Ukraine, such as those in Bryansk, Koursk, Belgorodto the north and even Rostovto the east, and the town of It vibrateswhich have been targeted on multiple occasions, mainly in 2023, and particularly the 14 et 18 september.
Sometimes fuel depots and electrical infrastructure were targeted, as revenge for the bombing of Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure, itself following the first attack on the Crimean bridge. Vicious circle of war!
At other times, the bombings targeted towns and villages without any military objectives apparently being targeted. Terrorizing populations seemed to be the only goal. Whereas, contrary to what the media like LCI tell all day long, Russian bombings always have military objectives, until proven otherwise. And they are most often done at night in order to limit the risk of causing collateral victims. But unfortunately there are some from time to time.
Kiev often denies its involvement, because its Western arms suppliers, notably France, do not support (officially in any case…) attacks against territories recognized by international law as Russian. A game of fools and hypocrites, because actions count much more than words.
Raids carried out by armed groups supposedly composed of Russian opponents, but equipped by Ukraine, were also carried out in 2023. One of these groups, the Russian Volunteer Corpsis led byDenis Kapustina man banned from staying in the EU, accused of links with neo-Nazis.
Although numerous news reports report dead and injured civilians, including children, during these attacks, I have not found an overall count of victims in these regions. And apparently the UN is not interested in this either because I haven’t found any reaction from the institution to the bombing of the Russian regions. Or maybe the media isn’t interested in it.
But how can we expect a balanced approach to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict from the UN when the latter promotes through its leader António Guterres an agenda of censure generalized world? Censorship against any questioning of the dogmas that the planetary elite wants to impose. And a binary reading of the war in Ukraine is part of it.
International organizations constantly under pressure
The Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sergei Lavrov, did not hold back, during his speech in New York last September, to remind the UN secretariat of its duties of impartiality and strict respect for the Charter of the United Nations, accusing the organization of ignoring its own principles on the right to self-determination peoples regarding certain regions of Ukraine, and to receive instructions from “certain countries”…
When I worked in Donbass, an executive from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva and a national of a Western country admitted to me that he was under enormous pressure from his government. to orient the organization’s reports on Ukraine in one direction and not the other. There was of course no need to ask in what sense… At the time, the OHCHR still managed to produce generally balanced reports. Thus, over the period 2014-2021on the eve of the Russian attack, the OHCHR estimated that the Donbass conflict had caused a total of more than 14,000 deaths, including around 4,400 Ukrainian soldiers, 6,500 separatist fighters, and at least 3,404 civilians… without specifying which side .
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) knew that most civilian casualties were on the separatist side, but refused to make the figures public after an initial report for 2016 mentioning this aspect was violently criticized by Kiev. However, this trend has never been reversed.
If things continue like this, one day Russia and BRICS will found their own international institutions and the UN will only be the club of Western countries and their vassal states.
#toll #civilian #casualties #war #Ukraine