The Confederation of Employers of Ukraine on Friday published data that may indirectly indicate the number of wounded in the Ukrainian army: according to a press release of the Confederation, the number of people who received disabilities in the first ten months of the war jumped by three and a half times compared to with peacetime and amounted to 45 thousand people, the Russian Service of the BBC cited the data.
“In the pre-war year, 13,000 people received disabilities. In the first 10 months of the war in 2022, according to official and not very adequate statistics, more than 45,000 Ukrainians received disabilities,” Ukrainian agencies quoted Valery Sushkevich, head of the Ukrainian National assembly of disabled people. His words are shared in a press release of the Confederation of Employers.
Sushkiewicz explains that the statistics “are not very adequate” because it is difficult to document the damage during the war and many of the wounded have not yet done so.
How many of these 45,000 are wounded soldiers, how many are wounded civilians, and how many are disabled with non-war-related disabilities is unknown.
Nearly 16,000 Ukrainian civilians have been injured since the war began, nearly 3,000 of them in Russian-controlled territory, according to the United Nations.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, 478 children have died as a result of hostilities and related events, the General Prosecutor’s Office of Ukraine said, as quoted by the BBC’s Russian Service in early May.
Ukrainian prosecutors estimate that 960 children have been injured since the war began.
“These data are not final. Work continues to establish the facts in the places of hostilities, in the temporarily occupied and liberated territories,” the announcement of the General Prosecutor’s Office says.
According to a report by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, from February 24, 2022 to April 23, 2023, 8,574 civilians were killed in Ukraine. 6611 people died in the territories controlled by the legitimate authorities of Ukraine and 1913 – in the territories occupied by Russia.