Ukraine Is Running Out Of Men As Hope Of Victory Fades
The reports are piling up — just like Ukrainian corpses — of Ukraine’s massive losses on the battlefield. A year ago, according to the Telegraph, lhopes ran high in Ukraine about an imminent victory. That celebratory chorus is gone; replaced by a funeral dirge.
As Alina Mykhailova, an officer and paramedic in the Ukrainian Army, spoke about how the killing of her commander had “orphaned” her unit, her pain was palpable.
“On losing this man, whom I loved so much and with whom I had shared so much, I realised that we in the battalion were now all orphans,” she said, wiping away tears while the audience before her struggled to contain theirs. . . .
“Perhaps the biggest difference from 2022 is that so many people have now died,” said Dmytro Natalukha, a Ukrainian MP attending the conference. “One in two people now know somebody who has died in the fighting. I’ve lost count of the number of my friends I’ve lost.”
One officer, speaking off the record, spoke about the toll that attacking across minefields against well-dug-in defenders without air cover had taken on his company. The men replacing those who had fallen, he added, lacked the same level of training and motivation. And, if the war drags on for one or two more years, the strain on Ukraine’s limited human resources could become immense.
This is not an isolated report. Grief over losses is widespread and the Ukrainian casualties soar with each passing day. The following was published in Ukraine by Ukrainian sources:
Of the 100 residents of Poltava, Ukraine, who were sent to the front in the fall of 2022, only 10-20 remained in service
The rest are dead or wounded, the acting head of the regional military enlistment office, Lieutenant Colonel Berezhnoy, said.
The horrific losses are hitting Ukrainians hard. Despite vows to fight to the bitter end or fervent belief in ultimate victory, the mismatch between Russia’s superior firepower and Ukraine’s increasingly desperate attempt to round up new recruits and get more weaponry from depleted American and NATO stores presents Kiev with an impossible task. The following video is representative of the despair.
Rumble version:
