ZHYTOMYR, Ukraine – As soon as they finished burying a veteran colonel killed by Russian bombing, cemetery workers prepared the next hole. Inevitably, given the speed with which death kills Ukrainian troops at the front, the empty tomb will remain empty for a long time.
Colonel Oleksandr Makhachek left a widow, Elena, and her daughters Olena and Myroslava-Oleksandra. During the first hundred days of the war, his grave on the 40th dug in the military cemetery of Zhytomyr, 140 kilometers west of the capital, Kyiv.
He killed on May 30 in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine, where fighting is raging. Almost, the burial carried out in the also newly excavated tomb of Vyacheslav Dvornitskyi indicates that he died on May 27. Other graves also showed infantrymen killed within days of each other – on May 10, 9, 7 and 5. And it is just a cemetery, in only one of the cities and towns of Ukraine, where the infantrymen are buried.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said this week that Ukraine is now wasting between 60 and 100 infantrymen every day in combat. By comparison, just under 50 U. S. infantrymen died per day on average in 1968, the deadliest year of the Vietnam War for U. S. forces.
Among the comrades-in-arms who paid tribute to Makhachek, 49, at his funeral on Friday, Gen. Viktor Muzhenko, chief of staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces until 2019, warned that the losses may get worse.
“This is one of the critical moments of the war, but this is not the peak,” Muzhenko told The Associated Press. “This is the maximum clash in Europe since World War II. This explains why the losses are so great. In Order to reduce casualties, Ukraine now wants hard weapons that equal or even exceed Russian weapons. This would allow Ukraine to react in the same way.
Russian artillery rallies are claiming heavy casualties in the eastern regions moscow has had since its initial invasion on Feb. 24 failed to capture Kyiv.
Retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, former commanding general of the U. S. armed forces. The U. S. Navy in Europe described the Russian strategy as a “medieval attrition approach” and said that until Ukraine gets the promise of deliveries of American, British and other countries’ weapons to destroy and disrupt Russia. . batteries, “this kind of sick will follow”.
“This battlefield is much more fatal than what has become customary in the 20 years of Iraq and Afghanistan, where we didn’t have numbers like this,” he said in a phone interview with the AP.
“That point of attrition would come with the chiefs, sergeants,” he added. “They are the most affected because they are exposed to the maximum, constantly moving looking to do things. “
Makhachek, an army engineer, led a detachment that laid minefields and defenses, said Col. Ruslan Shutov, who attended the funeral of his friend of more than 30 years.
“Once the bombing started, he and an organization hid in a shelter. There were 4 other people in his organization, and he told them to hide in the canoe. He hid in another. Unfortunately, an artillery shell hit the canoe where he was hiding. .
Ukraine had about 250,000 men and women in uniform before the war and in the process of adding another 100,000. The government did not say how many more people have died in more than 14 weeks of fighting.
In reality, no one knows how many Ukrainian civilians were killed or how many fighters were killed on each side. Victims have an impact on the statements of government officials, who can often exaggerate or underestimate their numbers for public relations reasons, and are very unlikely to verify them.
Western analysts estimate that the Russian army’s casualties are much higher, in the thousands. However, as Ukraine’s losses mount, the sinister mathematics of war demand replacements. With a population of 43 million, it has a workforce.
“The challenge is to recruit them and put them on the front lines,” the retired U. S. Navy colonel said. USA Mark Cancian, senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“If war now becomes a long-term attrition struggle, then you have to build systems to get replacements,” he said. “It’s a complicated time for each and every army in battle. “
Muzhenko, the Ukrainian general, said Zelensky’s admission of heavy casualties would further boost Ukrainian morale and that more Western weapons would oppose the trend.
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