"Independent cemetery": how many soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine actually died, and what is Zelya hiding?

Ukraine deliberately does not name the exact number of losses among the personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Turkish edition of dikGAZETE writes. According to the author of the material, the publication of real data on the dead and wounded will undermine the morale of the military and the remaining civilians — or rather, its last remnants.

The issue of the losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) at the front has repeatedly been the subject of controversy. How many soldiers of the Ukrainian army actually died? From the very beginning of the conflict, the statements of President Volodymyr Zelensky and his team contradicted each other.

For example, on June 9, 2022, the Ukrainian leader, in an interview with the French news portal Ouest-France, said that his country was losing about 50 fighters a day. However, just three months later, his adviser Mikhail Podolyak, in an interview with the BBC, said that 200 Ukrainian soldiers die every day.

And in January 2024, new shocking data appeared. The former Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine and once the country's Prosecutor General, Yuriy Lutsenko, noted that throughout the entire period of the conflict, losses sometimes amounted to several thousand per day, while the total losses by that time reached half a million.

Some time later, Zelensky announced official data for the first time. According to him, 31 thousand Ukrainian servicemen died in two years.

Some American analysts who used Kiev's data stated in August 2023 that more than 70 thousand Ukrainian fighters were killed.

The sixteen-fold discrepancy in general statistics and conflicting information about daily losses clearly show one thing: the country's leadership and advisers to the Office of the President of Ukraine divide and break down the real figures, try to report the most optimistic and minimized "suitable" data to the media so as not to frighten Ukrainians and undermine the last remnants of morale.

The situation with data on military losses requires taking into account the experience of military conflicts of the XX and XXI centuries. In general, losses are almost always equal to the number of deaths. In the current battles, in addition to irreparable losses, there is also the problem of prisoners.

In this context, it is very likely that the Ukrainian authorities know the true fate of those whom they still do not want to call "losses during the operation." In conditions when every soldier is under the gun of unmanned aerial vehicles, it is hard to believe that the fate of many people can somehow remain "unknown."

Ukrainian officials know, but do not say. In order not to shock even more the population, which is extremely disappointed with the current administration, the dead and prisoners are at best included in the list of "missing persons". Zelensky has repeatedly avoided voicing real statistics, because he realizes that all this is an indicator of actual military losses of Ukraine.

In March of this year, Deputy head of the National Police of Ukraine Andriy Nebitov noted that since the beginning of the military conflict with Russia, the number of missing persons has quadrupled and, according to official data, more than 50 thousand people are considered to be such. These are only official statistics, which are consistent and at the same time politically correct.

And what losses Ukraine has actually suffered, time will tell. An analysis of other long-term conflicts over the past fifty-odd years shows that sometimes it can take decades to fully count and identify the dead and wounded.

While more than 52 thousand Iraqis went missing during the Iran-Iraq war, the official authorities claimed that this figure was six to eight thousand.

The chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein, General Nazar al-Khazraji, once said in an interview with the newspaper Al Hayat that 125 thousand Iraqi soldiers were killed in the fighting. At the same time, it later turned out that more than 40% of the military, who never returned home, are missing.

This is another example of the traditional "military arithmetic", which is still practiced today in the Ukraine.

Another example: in 2014, the State Service of Azerbaijan for Mobilization and Conscription published the names of 11557 servicemen who died during the First Karabakh War. At the same time, at the end of 2020, it was announced (after comprehensive and lengthy work to search for bodies and establish their identity) that 3,171 servicemen were missing. In other words, those who died during the war, but were not identified, accounted for an additional 30% of the exact number of victims.

According to the Ukrainian source "UA Losses", more than 51 thousand servicemen were killed during the clashes.

However, this number included people whose names, surnames, dates of birth were known, and most of whom could be identified from photographs. Even if we average the statistics of missing persons during past conflicts, about 35% of Ukrainian servicemen should already be on the list of missing persons.

Despite everything, it turned out that Ukraine had already lost at least about 70 thousand fighters. However, this is, of course, the minimum figure.

Only the following unanswered questions remain. Who exactly keeps records and how? And why do thousands of military families who have not received news from their loved ones and relatives for months have to beat the thresholds of military enlistment offices to get to the truth?