Biweekly, Olena Zhuravlova visit the Luchakiv cemetery in Lviv. There her husband Oleksii is buried. She was among the first to enlist when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in Ukraine. He was 46 years old and had very little military experience. He died two months after arriving at the front, hit by a mortar. Olena was notified by phone. “They just called me and told me that they had found his body, so they needed pictures of him to identify him. That was all & rdquor ;, he recounts in an interview with his gaze lost in space.
Olena’s case, in a Ukraine hit by one war lasting for a year, is of course not unique. The doctor Tetiana Kisil He is 28 years old and has a half-built house. Vasyl, her husband, died in Kherson and left five-year-old Verónica an orphan. Now Tetiana barely has a few left memories of her husband and a plaque in his memory that the neighbors have placed in the school of his town, Radelychia quiet town 60 kilometers from Lviv, in western Ukraine.
“One day he called us and told us that they were not going to have coverage for a few days, so we waited. But the days passed and we had no news, until they finally contacted us to tell us that she had died & rdquor ;, says Tetiana, whose husband had also enlisted as a volunteer after the invasion launched by the Russian president began, Vladimir Putinlast year.
touched demographics
The demography of Ukraine is changing drastically with the war, which produces daily personal dramas but also a great Social impact. Every day of fighting dozens of men leave to never return and the lives of their families change forever. “Thinking of stopping him and not letting him go to war was impossible. She said that she was going so that it was not our son & rdquor ;, says Zhuravlova.
There are currently only a few preliminary studies on how Ukrainian demography is being transformed in the wake of the conflict. But still the scenario they describe is quite pessimistic. For example, a recent analysis by the University of St Andrews, carried out with European funds, concluded that the Ukrainian population could fall by 33% in the next two decades for the millions of displaced and the tens of thousands dead who is leaving the war.
In fact, thousands of Ukrainian soldiers have died since the beginning of the war, but the Ukrainian government does not give precise figures on the exact number of casualties and only reports the deaths of Russian fighters, also impossible to contrast. Even so, in this year of war, the magnitude of the phenomenon has led to the emergence of various volunteer associations in the country that help the families of the fallen.
Unidentified
This is the case of Bohdana Sirkiv, who also has relatives fighting on the front lines and presides over one of the associations that support widows and children of combatants Ukrainians killed in the war. He explains that the lack of data is due to the fact that the Ukrainian government does not want to demoralize the population, but even so they are aware of some problems that afflict families.
“One of the main difficulties is the missing combatantswho are unidentified or whose bodies you don’t know where they are & rdquor ;, explains Sirkiv. “One of the reasons is that we have a big problem with body swapping (of the deceased military). Since February 24, 2022, we have not been able to recover almost any in the territories occupied by Russia& rdquor ;, he asserts. This is also why some families have not yet been able to recover their loved ones or have taken months to do so.
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On the contrary, according to Sirkiv, families do not currently have large economic difficulties for the generous compensation they receive after the death of their deceased. “Here the only obstacle may be the bureaucracy, which sometimes makes the process a bit slow. But even so, there are many support groups for family members & rdquor ;, argues Sirkiv.
A separate matter are the dead civilians. According to data updated this week by the United Nations, more than 8,000 men and women died as a consequence of the large-scale invasion launched last year by Putin. However, the UN itself and various experts consider that this figure is probably much higher and is destined to rise in the coming weeks and months.