The Immense Human Cost to Ukraine of NATO’s Proxy War Against Russia
Aug. 10, 2023 (EIRNS)—The real cost of artificially keeping the war in Ukraine going, as the US/UK-dominated NATO is doing with its unending flow of weapons to the Kiv regime, is measured in blood, the avoidable loss of human lives, made inevitable only by NATO’s decades of pushing up against Moscow’s “brightest of red lines.” On Aug. 1, the Wall Street Journal ran an article estimating that somewhere between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians wounded in the war have had to have limbs amputated. It’s an estimate that approaches the 67,000 German troops and 41,000 British who had limbs amputated during World War I. The Ukrainian government doesn’t give out casualty figures, “But even as a rough estimate, the number casts light on the staggering human cost of Russia’s 17-month onslaught—a cost that will linger for decades,” the WSJ says.
The Journal reports later that out of 100 soldiers wounded within about 3 miles of the front line, 36% suffered very severe injuries, while between 5% and 10% of all deployed troops were killed, according to Ukrainian military estimates shared with a group of U.S. military surgeons. In comparison, only 1.3% to 2% of U.S. troops deployed in recent conflicts died in action. Western military surgeons haven’t seen such injuries on this scale since World War II, said Dr. Aaron Epstein, head of the Global Surgical and Medical Support Group of former military surgeons who train Ukrainian military medics. This is mainly the result of the intense use of artillery, which is being used on a scale that war futurists never thought would be seen again.
Yesterday, an analysis appeared on the Slavyangrad Telegram channel, trying to come up with an estimate of total Ukrainian casualties based not only on the Journal article but on studies of war casualties going back to World War I, and taking into account the advances in military medicine which have taken place since then, put forward the following analysis. “The number of soldiers with amputated limbs is an indicator which allows one to estimate the losses of the AFU as a whole,” writes the author, whose Telegram handle is @PanzerWaffle but whose real name is Robert Lazaro. Lazaro uses the figure of 4 percent, which was the ratio of amputations of American wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. Remarkably, the figure of 20,000 Ukrainian amputations translates to a figure of 500,000 for total Ukrainian wounded. He then applied the three-to-one ratio of wounded to killed typical of the artillery battles of World Wars One and Two to produce an estimate of 150,000 to 160,000 Ukrainian troops killed.
