It was just over a month ago that Hamas terrorists broke through the Gaza border with Israel and massacred 1,200 Israeli citizens, the vast majority of them civilians. The news, like lava flowing from a volcano, consumes dead bodies; it consumes mass graves; it consumes whole cities that lie in ruins after months of constant bombardment. The inexorable movement of the news is forever away from the volcano of what has happened.
Since Oct. 7, the news has moved on from the villages, kibbutzim and military outposts in Israel where all those people were killed, some of them burned beyond recognition. Others were children murdered in front of their parents; some were parents murdered in full view of their children, before they, too, were murdered or taken hostage.
Now the news gives us daily totals of the civilian casualties within Gaza. The total number of casualties stands today at 11,000, including just over 4,000 children. The burning viscous flow of the news will cover that number one day soon, just as it has covered the number of civilians dead and dying in Ukraine, which as of September of this year, 18 months since the start of Russia’s invasion, is 9,614, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Other outlets put the number much higher. Ukraine’s leading war crimes prosecutor, Yuriy Belousov, told The Independent earlier this year, “There could be 100,000 civilians killed across Ukraine, whose bodies will have to be found and identified once occupied territory is liberated.”
He could be right. Do you remember the name, Bucha? It is a Ukrainian village near Kyiv. In April of 2022, shortly after Russian forces were driven back from the area around Kyiv, evidence of a massacre was discovered by Ukrainian soldiers. According to the Ukrainian government, 458 bodies were found in Bucha after the Russians left the town, including nine bodies of children. According to OHCHR, March of 2022 was the deadliest month for civilians in Ukraine, with 4,168 killed and 3001 injured.
How about the town of Izium? In September of 2022, several mass graves were discovered in the forest near Izium. According to Ukrainian authorities, graves containing at least 440 bodies were discovered at one site near Izium. A few days later, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that two more mass graves had been discovered containing “hundreds of people.” Zelenskyy later told the press that as many as 1,000 Ukrainians may have been massacred by Russian soldiers in Izium before Ukraine re-took the town in its September 2022 offensive.
Do you remember the Russian airstrike on Mariupol that hit a maternity hospital? I wrote about it at the time, but I had to look it up to remember that it happened on the 9th of March in 2022. Four people were killed, 16 were wounded, and one pregnant woman suffered a stillbirth after being carried bleeding from the maternity ward where she was about to give birth. How about the attack on the theater in Mariupol a few days later? According to the Associated Press, as many as 600 civilians may have died in the theater where about a thousand civilians had gathered to shelter from the bombing of Mariupol, thinking that the Russians could not possibly deliberately target a civilian theater. The AP later established that about 200 people survived the airstrike by escaping the theater through the main entrance and one side entrance. The rear of the theater was completely crushed in the airstrike.
In August of this year, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon believes the total number of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers killed or wounded in Ukraine had reached 500,000. Russia’s army suffered 120,000 deaths, with somewhere between 170,000 and 180,000 wounded. Ukraine lost 70,000 soldiers and between 100,000 and 120,000 are wounded. In the battle for Bakhmut alone, the Pentagon estimates there were more than 100,000 Russian casualties, with more than 20,000 soldiers from the Wagner Group alone. Ukraine has not announced its losses, but they are estimated to be similar to Russia’s.
Between the 1st and 27th of August of this year, there were 712 civilian casualties in Ukraine, including 147 killed and 565 injured, according to OHCHR. Those numbers include at least one child dead and nine wounded. From September 1 to 10, the latest period for which numbers are available, there were 292 civilian casualties in Ukraine, with 55 killed and 237 wounded.
The war in Ukraine has settled into what military experts call a stalemate, with fighting between Russians and Ukrainians along a 600-mile front line. On Nov. 2, Ukraine’s top military commander admitted as much, telling The Economist, “Just like in the First World War we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate,” Gen. Valery Zaluzhny said. “There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.” Zaluzhny didn’t come right out and say it, but he seemed to blame the sporadic nature of Western military support for Ukraine’s inability to break through Russia’s defenses. “We need to ride the power embedded in new technologies,” Zaluzhny told The Economist.
It has taken the better part of two years for Ukraine to acknowledge the limitations of the support it has received from the United States and other NATO countries. For example, it took almost a year for the U.S. to supply Ukraine with top-of-the-line 155 mm howitzers and HIMARS ground-to-ground rockets from the Pentagon’s arsenal. Only last month did the Pentagon admit that it had delivered what it called “a small number” of U.S. ATACMS-guided missiles to Ukraine, which had been requesting the longer-range missiles for months. Even when the U.S. did deliver the ATACMS missiles, however, it supplied Ukraine with the version that has a range of 100 miles, rather than the longer-range model that can reach out with pinpoint accuracy to 180 miles. It was the same way with tanks and other heavy military hardware. Only after Germany and Great Britain delivered their Leopard and Challenger II tanks to Ukraine did the U.S. begin to send its Abrams M-1 battle tank, and even then, the U.S. sent older models of the Abrams with old technology target acquisition and aiming systems.
Ukraine has been supplied with “enough weapons to keep fighting but not to win,” Sasha Dovzhyk, editor of the London Ukrainian Review, wrote in the New York Times on Monday. She told of a friend of hers who acts as a “fixer” for Western journalists in Ukraine, helping to arrange their trips to Ukraine and, subsequently, their visits to the front lines. Dovzhyk’s friend was arranging a trip for Western journalists to an area of fighting in Eastern Ukraine when on Oct. 7, the trip was suddenly canceled, and the journalists suddenly made arrangements to travel to the Middle East to cover Israel’s war with Hamas instead. “The journalists will be back in no time once we liberate any significant patch of land,” said the Ukrainian fixer.
“Liberate another significant patch of occupied territories and discover another mass grave,” Dovzhyk added.
I am guilty myself of the tendency to look away from wars when the fighting slows down or the atrocities stop piling up. The horrific massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas on Oct. 7 had everyone’s attention for a week or so, and then came the alleged Israeli rocket strike on the Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza, which turned out not to be one of Israel’s rockets at all. Now all the talk is of Israel’s ground forces having surrounded Gaza City and confronting the dilemma of what they will do with other Gazan hospitals which Israel has said are being used as Hamas command centers and weapons stores.
No matter what Israel decides, the civilian body count will go up. It’s the only thing you can count on in war – the tragic deaths of the people who did not start the war but are only trying to live through it. The blood of innocents has been flowing on battlefields since before Alexander’s time, and it will be flowing in Ukraine long after Israel has completed its mission to rid itself of Hamas in Gaza. The Geneva Academy reports that “more than 45 armed conflicts are currently taking place throughout the Middle East and North Africa.”
Forty-five wars.
It’s no wonder the lava flow of the news does not stop. There is too much tragedy and death to cover. Wars, large and small, righteous or unjustifiable, keep being written not the disappearing ink of the news, but in blood.
