During the Russian war in Ukraine, a million people were killed and wounded on both sides: WSJ
The number of Ukrainians and Russians killed or wounded in more than two and a half years of war approached 1 million people, writes The Wall Street Journal. The exact number of civilian casualties remains unknown, but more than 8,000 people died during the siege of Mariupol alone, according to Human Rights Watch.
According to the results of a confidential Ukrainian assessment conducted in early 2023, the dead among the Ukrainian military are considered to be about 80,000 and the wounded – about 400,000. Estimates of Russian military casualties provided by Western intelligence vary, with some sources pointing to almost 200,000 dead. and about 400,000 wounded.
One of the motivations for the invasion of Vladimir Putin in 2022 was the desire to increase the size of the Russian population through the annexation of Ukrainian territories. Demographers and the government estimate that Ukraine has lost at least 10 million people to occupation or mass migration over the past decade.
Putin long ago declared the fight against demographic decline in Russia his priority and initiated a campaign to Russify the occupied Ukrainian territories. This process includes forced resettlement, forced distribution of Russian passports to Ukrainians, and abduction of children for their integration into Russian society.
The war caused large-scale demographic losses in both countries. About 600,000 Russians, mostly young professionals, fled Russia after the full-scale invasion began, adversely affecting the labor market and domestic demographics.
Ukraine also suffered catastrophic losses. According to the 2001 census, the population was 48 million. By the start of the war in 2022, this number had dropped to 40 million. Since the beginning of the invasion, more than 6 million people have left the country, and the population in the territories controlled by Kyiv has decreased to 25-27 million. Oleksandr Gladun, a researcher at the Ptukh Institute of Demography, noted that before the war, the population of Ukraine was about 42 million, and after it – about 29 million.
