On the deceased – Alexander Sarovic in Der Spiegel:

‘Ruslan Babinets fell on July 28 on the frontline near Avdiivka in the Donbas, just a month after his 24th birthday. He was the youngest soldier in his battalion.’

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‘In this fight for survival as an independent country, the Ukrainians are paying in blood. Several thousand soldiers have died since the beginning of the war, while many others have been wounded or are missing in action. According to a survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, roughly four out of five Ukrainians have close relatives or friends who have been wounded or killed in the violence.’

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‘He had his dreams," says his mother. "He wanted to move out of the village, buy a new car and build a home."

But instead, the war arrived. On Feb. 23, 2022, the day before the Russian invasion, Ruslan reported to the local enlistment office to report for duty. He became part of the 116th Brigade of the Territorial Defense Forces, a kind of civilian militia made up of reserve troops and volunteers who support the country’s regular army.
"He never said a word to us about his life on the front lines," says Ruslan’s sister Nadezhda, which was not out of character for him. The two women describe him as someone who, even before the war, never cried, didn’t like hugging and rejected anything that was too sentimental.’

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‘His mother says one thing really sticks in her mind when recalling the brief visit: "Ruslan was nervous. He proposed transferring ownership of his car to my husband," says Levchenko. "It’s almost like he had a premonition." It was the last time the family would see him.
Writing obituaries for soldiers like Ruslan Babinets is the most difficult part of his work, says Viktor Tkachenko. "Simple people who worked with their hands and could repair anything." He says he is particularly moved by their fates.
Tkachenko – a wiry 33-year-old with a shaved head and thoughtful face – is a data journalist. For the last 13 years, he has been working for Poltavchyna, a local media outlet in Poltava, the eponymous capital of the region. The seven-person newsroom headquartered in a former accordion factory publishes the names of every fallen soldier from the region, complete with pictures and short obituaries.’

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‘The Ukrainian army and Defense Ministry keeps the numbers secret, arguing that such information could be of assistance to the enemy. Occasional statements and estimates are the only clues that outsiders get. Top Ukrainian general, Valery Zaluzhny, spoke a year ago of 9,000 fallen troops. U.S. military intelligence officials estimated in early March that up to 17,500 Ukrainian soldiers had fallen in battle, according to leaked Pentagon documents.’

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‘Just how long and costly the war has already been is on full display in Avdiivka. The small city north of Donetsk has been on the front lines since way back in 2014. But since last February, when Russia expanded the war to the entire country, fighting in the town has grown even more intense. Most recently, there have been two or three dozen Russian attacks each day from the air or from mortar and artillery fire. It has long since become a brutal war of attrition, with a significant amount of blood spilled for very little forward progress. Ukrainian soldiers have compared the battles here to the murderous Western Front in World War I.’

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‘The losses Ukraine has suffered haven’t yet broken the country’s resistance. According to recent surveys, four of five citizens are opposed to ceding any territory to Russia, even if failure to do so might mean a longer war. Two of three Ukrainians are against negotiating with Moscow. The numbers have hardly changed at all in a year.
Many of Ruslan’s comrades in the 116th Battalion take a similar view. After months of heavy fighting, they are exhausted, says 41-year-old infantryman Dmytro, who worked as a jeweler before the war. He was wounded on the Bakhmut front and still has a piece of shrapnel stuck in the right side of his face. There is one thing he says that scares him more than a long war: a freezing of the conflict. Any break in the fighting, he believes, will be used by Russia to collect forces for yet another attack. And such a push, he says, could ultimately even reach his home region of Poltava.

That's where Lyudmyla Levchenko is sitting on her veranda, nine days after Ruslan’s death. She can’t hate the Russians, she says, doing so won’t bring her son back. And she plans to start working again soon, feeding the chickens and tending to the potatoes and tomatoes. That’s what Ruslan would have wanted, she says. "He never wanted us to cry."’

Read the article here.

The deceased should be kept secret, in order not to assist the enemy. That’s old news.

And the space for compromise seems to be small, on both sides. A prolonged war will be the outcome, till the population on one or both sides cannot bear the losses anymore.

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