The longer the military operation continues in Donbass, the more ordinary Ukrainians begin to wonder how many more lives must be absorbed by ATO (as the civil war is called in Kiev) in order to get enough and finally stop. Only those who seem to be finally struck by the ukrovirus of radicalism and hatred towards everything and everyone, and those who really believe the ukroSMI data about the "small" losses of the Ukrainian army and the National Guard in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, stand for the continuation of the ATO. And these data for today are as follows: in the combat zone during the operation, about 363 Ukrainian servicemen (including soldiers of the National Guard) were killed.
Even those who are on the side of Kiev participating in the war against their people do not doubt that these data are false. Just a few days ago, the Ukrainian edition of Gordon (the head of this project is a Ukrainian journalist and writer Dmitry Gordon) published an extensive interview with a National Guard soldier, who asked the correspondent not to give his name for security reasons.
According to a contract soldier of the National Guard who took part in the battles for Krasny Liman, Nikolaevka, Zakotnoye and other settlements in the southeast, the Ukrainian media tend to present biased data to viewers (readers, users, radio listeners), underestimating the losses of Ukrainian units, embellishing the situation with supplies, equipment, technical equipment. For us (Russians), America definitely did not open. But for the Ukrainians!..
The National Guard in an interview with the "Gordon" newspaper said that the losses among the Ukrainian servicemen, which Kiev officially recognizes, are in fact underestimated by 6-7 times.
From the interview:
If you were told on TV that two or three soldiers were killed in the past day, you should know that in fact there are 12-13, maybe more. For the entire time of the ATO in the Donbass, at least four thousand soldiers were killed. Official sources lie about the 363s, I don’t know why.
And what is there incomprehensible? UkroSMI has already put all its efforts into justifying the constant losses of the Ukrainian army and the national guard in battles with the "Russian army". Now, when the majority of adequate Ukrainians understand that there was no Russian army in the Donbass and there is no, it is becoming more and more difficult for people to hang noodles on their ears. Therefore, we have to go for another trick: "freeze" the number of casualties of servicemen, so that the people do not have a question about why there is no Putin army in the southeast, and the death toll is growing at a significant rate. And it is quite understandable that if suddenly Ukrainian television decides to report real information about the dead - about thousands of dead, then these numbers will cause a surge of civil indignation, which may well be followed by a Maidan, in comparison with which all previous Maidans would seem like flowers to Kiev.
Certainly, some of the readers will say: why, in fact, should we trust a single contract soldier from the Ukrainian National Guard - perhaps fear's eyes have become so big that this person is inclined to exaggerate losses. Naturally, an ordinary soldier simply, by definition, cannot know the real number of victims, but the fact is that there are other sources confirming the fact that during the punitive operation in the southeast, the Ukrainian army and the National Guard lost not 363 people, but many times more. This is confirmed at least by the fact that hundreds of Ukrainian servicemen are crossing the Russian border, and the ukrotelekanals report several dozen deserters. That is, an understatement, as they say, is obvious.
In attempts to somehow "powder" this understatement, ukroSMI, referring to the Ministry of Defense "nezalezhnoy", the leadership of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and other power structures, go to an entertaining trick. The fact is that with the "freezing" of the number of "two hundred", another figure began to grow - the missing. If we take into account that, according to statistics, only up to 10% of those missing in various military conflicts end up being survivors (captured, hiding from the war), then in the Ukrainian case, 90% of the missing may well be counted among the casualties.
High-ranking sources in the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine declare (attention!) 3,500 missing Ukrainian servicemen. If, again, refer to the statistics, it turns out that about 3, 1-3, 2 thousand ukrovoyaks died in battles with the militia or were covered by the so-called “friendly fire”. Adding to this value the official 363 "two hundredths", you can get approximately the same figures about which the National Guard fighter tells the Gordon edition.
What else says that the losses of the ukroarmiya, presented "officially", are far from real losses? Data from the militias. Everyone is free to believe this data or not, but it is impossible not to imagine them.
Representatives of the Donbass militia say that recently the Ukrainian security forces have not bothered to collect the bodies of their killed comrades. Thus, the press center of the Vostok brigade reported that several dozen corpses of Ukrainian servicemen remain at the height of Saur-Mogila, which are actually abandoned. Several dozen - this is only after one battle! The servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine did not take the bodies decomposing in the sun, but retreated into the lowland and dug in, turning the place of death of their comrades into a shooting area, waiting for the appearance of live targets from those who would be ready to betray the bodies of the military to the ground.
According to the Ukrainian servicemen themselves, the so-called funeral teams, usually heading to one territory or another to take out the bodies of the dead, are often themselves fired upon by their own soldiers from other units, since the level of interaction (radio communication) that takes place today in ukrovoy is in extremely low condition. It comes to the point of absurdity: the funeral teams are forced to move out to carry the bodies from the place of their death with the Ukrainian flag on a long flexible pole so that they can see their own. They say, if they see the flag, they won't shoot … The banner on the battlefield in the hands of a soldier as the main difference between "ours" and "aliens" is something from the Middle Ages … The Air Force did not shoot down the Malaysian Boeing, the pilot needed to take the Ukrainian flag overboard?.. Bitter irony. Very bitter …
But funeral teams are also different. The most popular among the Ukrainian security forces is a team of two or three soldiers and one excavator. Such a team simply dumps the bodies into a shallow (in order to save time and a desire not to get under fire from militia) pit dug by special equipment and lightly sprinkles the corpses with earth. Both the militias and the Ukrainian security forces themselves, participating in the battles in the Donbass, talk about how the smell of decaying flesh poisons the air in the vicinity of Shakhtersk, Krasny Liman, and other settlements. And these are most often “unaccounted for” losses - those same “missing” who will remain missing for Ukraine, so as not to denigrate the power of the main democrat “nezalezhnoy” - Petro Alekseevich Poroshenko - a person who cares about the prosperity of the Ukrainian nation by reducing its number on funds collected in the form of a special tax from the same nation …
