Counting the Dead in Ukraine

Sanjana Varghese

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In 2018, a small part of the Ukrainian military began gathering data about civilian harm in ongoing fighting in Donetsk and Luhansk, two Ukrainian regions in the Donbas, seized by Russian-backed groups four years earlier. It was a rare move, one of only a handful of militaries around the world to have established such detailed monitoring of the civilian consequences of war.

Then, in February, Russia invaded.

“From day one of the [invasion], on the 24th and 25th, we were on the phone with people working to support this unit and they were saying, ‘sorry, I have to hang up and go fight,’” said Beatrice Godefroy, Europe director at CIVIC, one of the NGOs that helped establish the Ukrainian military’s civilian casualty monitoring cell. Structures that had taken years to build up risked being overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis.