Detention, civilian deaths and destroyed houses: what damage Putin’s war has done to Ukraine and Russia

Almost 20 thousand people were detained at anti-war actions in Russia during the full-scale war in Ukraine, this is the largest number of detainees in the last 10 years. More than 5,000 administrative cases have already been filed against protesters for participating in protests, publishing anti-war posts and comments, and performing Ukrainian songs. At least 25 teachers and 63 students were expelled from Russian universities due to their anti-war stance. The largest number of deductions for political reasons occurred in St. Petersburg, Moscow and Grozny — more than 80% of such cases.

During the full-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine, more than 6,800 peaceful Ukrainians died. According to the UN, more than 10,000 people were injured. Experts say that in reality the number of victims is much higher, because the exact number of dead residents of Mariupol is still unknown.

“The city was besieged for more than a month and subjected to tank and heavy artillery fire, street battles continued there. According to various estimates, from 20,000 to 90,000 people could have died as a result,” says the article of the “Important Histories” publication.

According to the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, 450 children died as a result of Russian military actions in Ukraine. Children in the Donetsk region suffered the most. And in the temporarily occupied territories, the aggressor country carries out a large-scale deportation of small Ukrainians. The Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine reports on more than 13,000 cases of deportation of Ukrainian children to the Russian Federation.

“After all, the goal of Putin, the Russians, is to make as few Ukrainians as possible. They would like to destroy us altogether. The second goal, and it is important for them, is to increase the number of citizens of the Russian Federation of Slavic appearance, because when children are deported, sent to orphanages, they are given a Russian passport through the appointed guardians. Here we recorded cases – a year, 3.5 years – at such an age can a child be aware of something?” – says Pavlo Lysyanskyi, co-founder of the Institute of Strategic Research and Security.

More than 50% of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure was damaged by Russian attacks. As a result, Ukrainians are left without electricity, heat and water. However, most often the Russians shelled residential buildings, depriving Ukrainians of their homes. According to the Kyiv School of Economics, since the beginning of the war, the Russian military destroyed and damaged 144,000 residential buildings. Experts are sure that the majority of such strikes are carried out by the Russian army on purpose in order to intimidate and break the Ukrainians.

“This is terror, intimidation. Their goal is to psychologically break Ukrainian civil society. They think that a broken society will put pressure on Zelensky and say: “To hell with him, let the Russians rule us,” said Russian military expert Pavlo Luzin in an interview with the “Vazhnye istorii” publication.

Since the start of hostilities, the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine has recorded more than 55,000 war crimes committed by the Russian military. Most of them are under the article on violations of the laws and customs of war, which includes torture, rape and murder of the civilian population.

“Every day on live TV, the world sees hundreds of war crimes committed by the Russian armed forces. Complete disregard for international law and human rights. There is not a single article of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Russia has not violated,” the agency’s press service quotes Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andrii Kostin as saying.

However, the military invasion resulted in huge losses for Russia itself. According to the General Staff of Ukraine, by the tenth month of the war, Russia had irretrievably lost more than 100,000 soldiers. Among these losses are mobilized Russians, who are often sent to the front without training, experts say.

“The mobilized, who took part in hostilities, at best underwent retraining or training from scratch within a few days. Sending people to the front like this is a crime. When you are pulled from civilian life into the army, you must first undergo personal training, then as part of a crew, unit, platoon, and then go through reconciliation,” the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) team of experts comments on the situation.

According to “Important Histories”, the Russian army lost up to 80% of all its combat-ready tanks and about 33% of its armored vehicles. A significant part of them fell into the hands of the Ukrainian army: 36% of the tanks and armored vehicles lost by Russia were captured by the Armed Forces of Ukraine or abandoned by the Russian army during the retreat, according to data from the Oryx project. According to the Russian military industry expert, even if the capacity of defense enterprises is increased, the quality of the manufactured equipment will not improve.

“We will be able to produce high-tech, advanced types of weapons in large commercial quantities. But these will not be the most advanced weapons systems, but 20-year-old combat systems,” the military expert explained to the “Vazhnye istorii” publication.

The war in Ukraine hit the Russian budget. The Ukrainian publication Forbes calculated that in nine months, Russia spent $82 billion on equipment, ammunition, military support, and compensation for the wounded and the families of the dead, which is a quarter of the annual budget.

“A quarter of all expenses are classified. This is a record since 2015. On the other hand, expenditures for military needs are protected from falling revenues, that is, in the event of a budget shock (a sharp decrease in revenues), other expenditures will go under, for example, on the development of the economy and other social programs,” Oleksandra, an expert on Russian economic policy, told the “Important Histories” publication. Prokopenko.

According to Rosstat, more than 8.5 million people have left Russia since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine. After the so-called partial mobilization, another 700,000 Russians left the country in just two weeks.

The network showed what Mariupol looks like on New Year’s Eve today. The city was almost completely wiped off the face of the earth, and thousands of people were left homeless.

The adviser to the Mariupol chairman, Petro Andryushchenko, published sad footage of Mariupol destroyed by the Russians, where New Year’s lights were shining and happy people lived just a year ago. He noted that even clumsy tasteless Christmas trees do not save from the truth.

“Left Bank for now. Thousands of people are homeless. Thousands of apartments, dozens of houses have been turned into ashes and construction debris,” Andryushchenko said.

The video shows one of the streets of the city, on which there is no living space left.

“To estimate the size. In order to walk everything on the video, you need to spend at least half an hour at an average pace for a healthy, middle-aged person in good physical shape. Territorially, this is almost half of the Left Bank district of Mariupol,” the adviser to the chairman explained.

Earlier, Andryushchenko recalled that a year ago, thousands of happy people were walking around Mariupol decorated with Christmas decorations, and now they are on the verge of survival. Most of the favorite locations of Mariupol residents were simply destroyed by Russian terrorists.

This year, Mariupol has nothing to do with New Year’s mood. Now the main task of the people who remained in the city is to find food and a safe place to live.

Russian war criminals demolished the ruins of the academic regional drama theater in the temporarily occupied city of Mariupol. As a result of a Russian airstrike on March 16, 2022, hundreds of people died there;

An American TV presenter broke down in tears when she talked about the tragedy of the destroyed Ukrainian Mariupol. One of the TV channels aired a story about the fabulous New Year’s celebrations in the city last year.

The Russian occupiers place their soldiers in schools in the occupied territories. Another school was seized by the occupiers in Melitopol. It is located in a residential area of ​​the city. All the furniture was taken out of the school, and the building itself housed those who build and restore roads along which military equipment is then transported. Russian terrorists choose buildings right next to high-rise buildings to cover themselves with people as a human shield.

The critical shortage of medical personnel in all hospitals in the territories temporarily occupied by Russia leads to incredible losses among the occupiers. The number of injured invaders is increasing every day, but the number of people who are able to help them is decreasing.

The Russian military-political leadership is trying in every way to encourage or force medics to move to the temporarily occupied Donbas and Crimea. However, there are almost no people willing to make such trips.

If immediately after the beginning of the full-scale invasion, thanks to a serious campaign, the Russian leadership could still find nurses and paramedics willing to move from the hinterland to Simferopol or Donetsk, then already in October-November the flow of personnel became practically zero.

A surgeon who came on vacation in the summer is being held in Crimea

• Even before the counteroffensive of the Armed Forces, when the Russians actually believed that the “special operation” was going according to plan, the invaders managed to find doctors and teachers who would volunteer to move to the temporarily occupied territories.
• Such desperadoes were promised to pay triple salaries, rent out their own apartments and generally provide everything they need. He said that everyone who responded to the call of the motherland in a time of need will have money and comfort.
• It is clear that the possibility of receiving 30,000 rubles instead of 10 motivated Russian specialists to move. If we add to this life in a “squeezed” and well-furnished apartment, and not in a destroyed barracks, the prospect of exchanging Moscow for Donetsk was very appealing to many.
• However, although after arriving in the occupied territories the medics were not provided with the comfortable conditions that were promised, many of them remained satisfied with the changes in their lives – up to the realization that “working in the rear” in the occupied territories is a one-way ticket. After all, they have no option to give up their post and return to Russia, and all of them, de facto, are violators of the law.

The ban on leaving Crimea and the occupied territories of Luhansk and Donetsk regions for all doctors has been in effect since August. At the same time, it concerns not only those who left their homes and moved on their own initiative. For example, the hospital in Simferopol still employs a surgeon from St. Petersburg who came to Crimea for vacation in the summer. The man was simply caught by FSB officers during a check on a train heading to the mainland, forced to leave and get a new job in the capital of the Autonomous Republic. To all questions, when he will be allowed to leave, the Russian special services answered very simply: “As soon as it is possible, they will tell you.”

At the same time, everyone understands that no one will ever give any permission, because the hostilities in Ukraine continue, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine will sooner or later enter Crimea and liberate Donbas. Then all Russians will have to explain to the Kyiv authorities what they did in the occupied cities.

There are no medical personnel who want to be convicted for illegally crossing the border and participating in aggression against Ukraine. They all want to go home.

Similarly, in Donetsk, Makiivka, Luhansk, Alchevsk and other cities, those doctors who believed the promises of the Russian authorities and volunteered to “work for several months in the liberated territories” are forcibly detained. Only in Donbas, in case of disobedience, hospital personnel are promised to be sent to the front lines.

However, even despite this situation, there is a critical shortage of people with medical education in the cities temporarily controlled by the Kremlin. Since the available number of doctors simply cannot provide assistance to all wounded and sick invaders. Also, in Moscow, they are close to starting to forcibly evacuate medics to Donbas.

The surgical team was killed for the sake of the picture

In December 2022, the Russian command significantly increased the wave of recruitment of doctors to be sent to Donbas.

However, they cannot recruit the required number of people from all over Russia. After all, one way or another, everyone understands that work in the East of Ukraine is associated with significant risks to life. The persuasion of doctors by Russian special services is especially cynical after the recent shelling of the Kalinin Donetsk Regional Hospital, when the invaders fired at a medical facility from “Hradiv” simply for the sake of a propaganda plot.

Although the occupiers themselves say that practically no one was injured, and only two were killed, in reality the number of victims of Russian provocative shelling is significant. In pursuit of the picture of “atrocities in Kyiv”, according to Ukrainian special services, the Russian attack on the hospital took the lives of at least 15 people.

Among the dead are a surgeon, two nurses and an orderly who came to Donetsk from Russia in October. At the time of the shelling, they tried to save the life of one of the wounded near Avdiivka, a Russian chmobike. From now on, the occupiers must find a replacement for this brigade, because one way or another, surgeons near the front are very much needed.

The head of the human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties, which received the Nobel Prize, Oleksadra Matviychuk, said that the occupiers keep civilian prisoners in torture chambers in the occupied territories and in pre-trial detention centers and other places of deprivation of liberty on the territory of Russia.

She said: “It all depends on specific periods of time. In Kyiv region and Kharkiv region, every village had a room for torture and illegal detention of people. These rooms were located in different places: the basement of a school or administrative building, a kindergarten, a residential building”, yes she answered the question in which places civilians are held captive.

According to the organization’s database, the number of civilian prisoners is 700 people.

Matviychuk noted that this figure is only the tip of the iceberg, so it does not reflect the real picture.

“It is known that some people are illegally transferred to occupied territories that have long been under the control of the Russian Federation (some territories of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Crimea). There are also facts of the transfer of civilian prisoners to pretrial detention centers and to official places of deprivation of liberty on the territory of Russia,” she added. laureate

Oleksandra Matviychuk also reported that the Russian Federation is also holding children captive.

“Such cases exist and, unfortunately, they are not isolated,” she answered the question of whether there were cases where children were among the civilian prisoners.

She told about a specific case of taking a child hostage.

“I immediately think of a very well-known case that we dealt with regarding Vlad Buryak, who was taken hostage because his father is one of the officials in the Zaporizhia region. The child was taken hostage. The entire car with civilians in which Vlad was were missed, and it was he who was taken because of his last name,” Matviychuk said.