The (London) Times reports the latest estimates of deaths in the illegal war launched by Russia nearly three years ago. All "metrics" of war — as Bush II's clueless defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, enjoyed calling measurements of death and destruction — are hard, painful things to read. They're even harder reading when one reflects on the near certainty of their avoidance had the United States intervened aggressively.
And unimaginable is the emotional torment Ukraine's surviving victims must feel about America's indecisiveness and serial delays. That Russian forces carried out the invasion in indescribably monstrous ways, including against their own troops, was almost a given, considering Vladimir Putin's apparent determination to imitate Stalin's Red Army. Not a given, however, was President Biden's dawdling. Nor was what followed.
In early 2025 the United Nations estimated that 12,500 Ukrainian civilians, 650 children included, have been killed. The number is inaccurate, very much so, since the U.N. has been unable to gather information from Ukrainian territories under Russian control. In Mariupol alone, for instance, civilian deaths ranged anywhere from 25,000 up to 75,000.
Ukraine's military deaths are even more unascertainable. In December, and for the first time, President Zelensky said 43,000 soldiers had died, a number he likely set artificially low because of "fears that they could demoralise society," as the Times notes. Yet his number wasn't absurd, as Trump's was — also in December he ventured, out of nothing, that 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died. Evidently unsatisfied with that preposterous figure, and because he's an idiot, in January Trump upped the number of dead to 700,000.
He wasn't doesn't. Turning his hazardous waste of a brain to the matter of Russian soldiers killed, last month Trump said there have been one million — a big and impressive round number which he always prefers to reality. Back on earth, BBC Russia and an exiled opposition website have estimated Russia's dead at 90,000, while Britain's defense ministry has calculated somewhere around 800,000 dead and wounded, although each is unspecified.
The Ukrainian military says it has killed nearly 200,000 Russian soldiers, which in accuracy may be closer. It's supported by a BBC Russia journalist: "Death toll on the Russian side could be between 138,500 and 200,000" and possibly higher if one includes the number of pro-Russian fighters who've been killed in eastern Ukraine, which is Russia-controlled.
Because the Kremlin lies as often as today's White House, nothing it says about its military deaths is believable. On the other hand it has said little, which says a lot.
As for Russia's civilian casualties, an independent website known as 7 x 7 claimed in 2023 that there had been about 400 caused by Ukrainian attacks. Adds the Times: "Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians from both countries have also lost one or more limbs."
Statistics are unsentimental, they conceal the human agony behind them. But they do reveal the immensity of Biden's blunder, enlarged even further because of America's NATO leadership. We saw it coming and we saw it early. Only 41 days after Russia invaded Ukraine, I wrote:
The U.S. has announced another, underwhelming $100 million in military hardware for Ukraine, and, since the West has essentially maxed out on sanctions against Russia, it's now going after two more Russian banks and ... Putin's two daughters.
This is the wholly irreconcilable manner in which the West is demonstrating its unexampled "outrage" over Russian war crimes, a mere fraction of which the world has yet to see. Zelensky may be trying to embarrass the West, but so far he has embarrassed only onlookers like me. I'm ashamed of the West. And given the potential ramifications of the Russia-Ukraine war — a very real, much larger war between East and West, democracy and autocracy, freedom and oppression — the West seems to be asleep, as it was in the mid-1930s.
Such was the year 2022, which lasted until November 2024. The European West has been startled awake. Yesterday, its leaders' "hand-wringing gave way to harried acceptance of a new world in which Europe’s most powerful ally has begun acting more like an adversary" (NYT). Trump is fashioning that which President Biden made possible: a cataclysmic finality. He's handing Putin a fifth of Ukraine and leaving all other Ukrainians to the Russian dictator's incomplete, imperialistic bloodlust.
Also volcanic for Europe as well as the globe: Should the Russia-Ukraine war indeed bring about a continental war of democracy versus autocracy within the next few years, the newly deadborn U.S. beacon of liberty would sit on the sidelines. After all, it has its own autocrat.
Only Americans are asleep.
I'm envisioning a scenario in which the Fascist States divvy up Ukraine betwixt the two of them--altogether too similar to the dismemberment of Poland, where, in accordance with the secret protocol to their non-aggression pact, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland on September 29, 1939. And we know what happened less than two years later. Der Orange Fuhrer has already said he intends to make Ukraine pay for all the aid they've received by giving up a 50% slice of the country's mineral wealth (https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-zelensky-rare-earth-ukraine-russia-peace-talks-b2699905.html). And I imagine Putin would be tickled red to take the other half. This all sounds distressingly familiar.