The head of the EU Commission has attracted great criticism with a carelessly prepared video message on the Ukraine war. She was forced to delete a passage with incorrect numbers of victims. The real number is difficult to estimate.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen during a visit to Ireland on Thursday.
How many victims are there in the Ukraine war? The number is unknown to the public, but the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, thought she knew the answer. In a video message this week, she mentioned an estimate of more than 20,000 civilian deaths and more than 100,000 military deaths on the Ukrainian side. She has since had this statement deleted, but the original version of the video is still available online.
Shortly after the publication on Wednesday, the government in Kyiv said angrily that only the supreme commander of the Ukrainian armed forces, the president and the defense minister could publish reliable figures on the casualties. Brussels responded quickly with a new version of the video message, which lacked information on the number of victims.
Reuploading because some people have problems with the video pic.twitter.com/jpg2RhaoIm
— Kasa (@Portugalujo) November 30, 2022
Citing “external sources”
A commission spokeswoman tried to downplay the error by saying that the information came from “external sources”. They should have recorded both dead and wounded and should have shown “Russia’s brutality”. There is no need to apologize to Ukraine, the spokeswoman said. She did not want to reveal where von der Leyen got her numbers from.
There is a high probability that these are American sources – misquoted. Three weeks ago, General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a speech in New York by “well over 100,000” killed or wounded Russian soldiers and added that the same probably applies to the Ukrainian side.
It is therefore natural that von der Leyen’s speechwriters used this figure and overlooked that General Milley had included the injured. The blunder made by the President of the Commission is even more embarrassing because in the original version she spoke of “military officers” who had been killed. The total number of casualties, including soldiers and non-commissioned officers, would have been estimated at a multiple of 100,000. It is obviously a substantive error and not, as some media speculated, a secret accidentally revealed by Brussels.
As a former German defense minister, von der Leyen should have known how carefully the number of victims should be dealt with. In Brussels, there is a rumor that the President of the Commission, who has acted unhappily in many respects, is eyeing the post of NATO Secretary General, which will become vacant next year. With their latest glitch, the chances of that happening may have dropped.
Anger in Kyiv
The Ukrainian government is angry for understandable reasons: It wants to avoid the dissemination of inflated numbers – also to maintain the morale of its own troops. She tends to have an interest in rarely making official statements about her own losses and keeping the numbers small. An adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky spoke on Thursday of 10,000 to 13,000 military personnel who have died so far.
A Ukrainian woman mourns her son, who was killed in the war, in a cemetery in the city of Mikolajiv.
The true figure may not even be known to the Americans; in this respect, Milley’s number is probably only a rough estimate. Taking his statement of “well over 100,000” as a starting point and assuming, according to a common, albeit overly simple, rule of thumb that there are three injured for every one killed, the USA would assume more than 25,000 military fatalities on the Ukrainian side.
On the Russian side, the casualty balance would look similar. However, the actual casualties are likely to be significantly higher, since several categories are missing from Milley’s estimate – namely the missing soldiers and the prisoners of war. The militias of the “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, who are fighting on the Russian side, may not have been taken into account either. Only the armed forces of the eastern Ukrainian province of Donetsk, annexed by Russia in September according to the local authorities 21 000 dead and injured.
Obviously fake statistics in Russia
The Moscow leadership has not published figures for all of Russia since September. At that time, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu spoke of 5,937 casualties. However, this number was demonstrably incorrect, as a significantly higher number of fatalities could already be documented at that time based on public sources such as obituaries and funeral notices.
In this way, the Russian Internet magazine «Mediasona» in cooperation with the Broadcaster BBC identified more than 9,300 killed Russian military personnel by the end of November. However, based on spot checks in cemeteries, the authors have reason to believe that the number of victims buried in Russia is around twice as high, because in many cases there is no death notice.
In addition, there are the casualties of the pro-Russian Donbass militias mentioned and those killed Russians whose mortal remains remained in Ukraine. The latter number is also very likely to be in the thousands. A conservative estimate thus gives a lower limit of 30,000 Russian casualties and total losses – including wounded – of 130,000 men. This, in turn, is consistent with Milley’s estimate of well over 100,000 dead and wounded.