By Oleg Vernyk
November 19, 2024 was a sad date for the Ukrainian people: exactly one thousand days have passed since the aggression of Russian imperialism against Ukraine on a large scale. Of course, the language of numbers is not able to fully illuminate that tectonic fracture in the lives of millions of people who faced the biggest European catastrophe since World War II. However, it is the language of numbers that helps to properly immerse us in the context of the problems of the current Russian-Ukrainian war.
• During these 1,000 days, the fighting covered approximately 109,059 km2, 18% of the entire territory of Ukraine. Since February 24, 2022, they have been taking place on the territory of 11 out of 24 Ukrainian regions. They are currently continuing in five regions - Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson. The Chernihiv, Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk and other regions are also under regular attacks with high-precision missiles and bombs.
• Remaining under occupation are the 66,932 km2, 11% of the total territory, which the Russians captured after the start of the invasion. In total, since 2014, Russia has occupied 10,725 km2 of Ukrainian territory (18.3%), including the Autonomous Republic of Crimea, and the territories of Donetsk and Lugansk regions.
• According to UN reports, at least 12,162 Ukrainian civilians have been killed and 26,919 wounded during the full-scale war as of the end of October 2024, figures that do not include deaths in Mariupol. The Russians have carried out more than 1,600 shellings of residential buildings in the rear or frontline areas with which as of November 18, 2024 they have killed at least 2,600 civilians.
• According to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, at least 593 children have died, another 1,686 were wounded, many were deported and more than 20,000 Ukrainian children illegally taken to Russia have been identified.
• According to the Operational Data Portal, 6.79 million Ukrainians became refugees, the vast majority of whom found asylum in European countries. Another 560 thousand left for countries in North and Latin America, Africa, Asia and Australia.
• According to the Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights, during the invasion, the Russians destroyed about 250 thousand residential buildings. This includes buildings destroyed by shelling and those washed away after the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station was destroyed on June 6, 2023.
One could go on for a long time with these horrifying statistics on Russian imperialist aggression. The language of figures is merciless in its verdict on the aggressor, but it is clearly insufficient to describe the heroism of the resistance shown by the Ukrainian people. Let us recall that at the beginning of the Russian aggression the Western intelligence services of the NATO countries predicted that the resistance would not last more than a week. Today, there is more and more information about the agreement between Western imperialism and Russian imperialism on the eve of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama categorically prohibited (“did not recommend”) post-Maidan Ukrainian authorities to offer armed resistance to the Russian army in the occupation of Crimea. Much later, i.e. in 2023, Obama tried to justify his policy by the significant number of pro-Russian people in Crimea. Russian imperialism, as is traditional for it, first sent troops and seized all strategic facilities in Crimea, achieved the withdrawal of Ukrainian units without resistance, under US guarantee, and only then organized a pseudo-referendum on the “annexation of Crimea to Russia”. Even according to bourgeois international law, referendums held under military occupation lack legal force and their results of validity. With the occupation Putin trampled on and annulled the right of the Crimean people to real self-determination. Not to see in the situation of 2014 the obvious complicity of Western imperialism with Russian imperialism is to “put on rose-colored glasses” and ignore the analogies with the Munich Agreements of 1938.
